Cloud Standards: Trickier than Nailing Jell-O to a Wall

Just try creating a definition of cloud computing that's broad enough to encompass all its permutations and narrow enough to provide technical guidance on how to get one cloud talking to another.

At least three years (although possibly eight, arguably 11 and somewhat untenably, one) after the phrase "cloud computing" was first used to describe on-demand computing services, nearly every conversation with experts involves defining what you both mean by it.

"At Burton Group it took a meeting where all the analysts were present over two days to come up with a definition, and it ended up being very small, so it could encompass everything," according to Chris Wolf, analyst at the Burton Group.

"Not always, but usually you're talking about either software as a service, infrastructure services, or running an application on someone else's cloud," according to James Staten, analyst for Forrester Research. "Within that there are a lot of variations. There are no standard pricing models, standard offerings, definitions of terms-if enterprises are going to consume this, they have to know what they're getting. There have to be things that will be the same from cloud to cloud," Staten says.

The Desktop Management Task Force (DMTF) may not solve the Jell-O problem, or even the definition of Cloud, but it is working on a set of specifications that should give both cloud providers and customers a common language to describe what services a cloud offers and how to make use of them, according to Winston Bumpus, president of DMTF and director of standards architecture at VMware.

The DMTF announced this week it has formed a working group called the Open Cloud Standards Incubator, to lay out a set of specifications defining how cloud-computing platforms can define their own operations and interoperate with others.

Key among the desired requirements will be common terms describing the capabilities or services one cloud supports, the quality of service it offers, protocols for customers to provision new servers or applications, billing and verification of the services customers buy, and the secure management of data within the clouds. These elements can help prevent vendor lock-in.

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