Open Cloud Manifesto

I’ve watched the threads around the Open Cloud Manifesto from the sides.  When It first read the manifesto, my first reaction was to think that it what somewhat strange for a document like that to demand that the Cloud be open and at the same time, doesn’t provide a definition to open.  What should be open?  Oh, open meaning that customers should be able to take their cloud app from one vendor to the other and expect it to run?  Can you do that today with Web apps?  Let’s say…can you take your J2EE app running on WebShere and connected to an Oracle database and switch to a PHP hoster running MySQL?

I’d rather have “open” defined as a way for cloud apps to exchange information thru the use of open standards like REST, XML, HTTP, ATOM and so on.  That makes sense.

Also, don’t you think it’s rather strange that neither Amazon, Google or Microsoft signed it?  Oh, and IBM signed it, right?  Oh wait, are they working on a cloud offering?  No?   Hummmm  ;-)

So yes, the Cloud should be open.  Let the vendors compete and create tomorrow's computing platforms but as customers, let’s demand that these platforms talk to each other via open protocols.

1 Comment

  • I agree with "open standards" but the big issue with "open standards" is that its slow the pace of implementation down considerably.Cloud computing has lots of promise we don't want it to get bog down in some standards war

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