Re: Cloud Definitions

I think one of the problems here is that some cloud-based web services, particularly very scalable ones, such as databases are essentially defined by their limitations in material ways. Any standard that could be consistently and properly supported across most services may necessarily be so constrained that you lose most of your functionality or so broad that no one can reasonably implement the spec for fundamental architectural reasons. Finding a balance that people are happy with will be difficult, and at this stage in the game I think many types of services (like cloud database services) are so limited that it might be premature to define standards derived from the current weak implementations if the market is moving quickly -- you may lock out better ways.

Of course, standardization of interfaces does not imply practical portability, though it helps. There are plenty of examples where architectures behind the standard interface vary sufficiently that you end up writing for a specific architecture through the standard interface. (See: portability of SQL-based apps across databases that use different concurrency control models.) On the other hand, a lot of services should be effectively standardizable and it should be encouraged, but I think for some core services this will be harder than it sounds. Transparency of switching between cloud providers may be hard to come by even if the interfaces are the same.

Cheers,

Andrew

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