Cloud Computing Interoperability Forum (CCIF) reconsiders its role

Following my broadside on Sunday and a flurry of posts from an IP troll there's been a renewed discussion about cloud standards and particularly the role of the Cloud Computing Interoperability Forum (CCIF). There was a fair bit of chatter on twitter about it and eventually Reuven issued a statement "Reaffirming the CCIF Goals and Mission" before popping off to Sweden.

The main message was:

The goal of the CCIF is to be a thought forum and advocacy group for cloud interoperability and related standards, it is NOT to be a standards body.

And for that the mission is three fold:

1. Free, in person events like Cloud Camp and the Wall Street / Mountain View & Washington Cloud Interoperability Forums.
2. A community site for professional, open and unmoderated discussion, relating to cloud computing interoperability
3. A place to incubate actual working groups doing real technical proposals for specific areas of the cloud computing interoperability. We should encourage these proposals to target submission for consideration to an existing standards or industry organization if one exists.

Ok events are cool. There's one in London in a few hours that a bunch of people are apparently going to and I'd rather like to be there myself were it not for time.

A community site for professional, open and unmoderated discussion. Check. In fact that's what I've been asking for all along. Only CCIF is still none of those things:

• Professional? Maybe, except for here, here, here, here, here, here, and my personal favourite, here. And that's just this week.
  
• Open? Perhaps, if you call "invitation only" open. One can request an invitation but that's not anything like my understanding of open, especially when requests tend to get rejected, ignored, missed, etc. (like my first 2 attempts to join the unifiedcloud group)
  
• Unmoderated? Only it's not according to Google Groups (above), despite a unanimous consensus to reject moderation. I sent the following post many hours ago seeking feedback on the Cloud Platform Reference Architecture and it still hasn't hit the list - another little white lie perhaps?
  

MIME-Version: 1.0
Received: by 10.210.78.3 with HTTP; Tue, 10 Mar 2009 13:58:29 -0700 (PDT)
Date: Tue, 10 Mar 2009 21:58:29 +0100
Delivered-To: xxxx@samj.net
Message-ID: <21606dcf0903101358m5a54e0aeq9fbfe980830c37f4@mail.gmail.com>
Subject: Re: Cloud Platform Reference Architecture
From: Sam Johnston 
To: Jayson Vantuyl 
Cc: Cloud Standards Group , CCIF 
Content-Type: multipart/mixed; boundary=0015174be85a5822b20464ca03c4

The last point's the best though: "A place to incubate actual working groups doing real technical proposals for specific areas of the cloud computing interoperability". But wait, CCIF "it is NOT to be a standards body" so what's all this about "actual working groups" doing "real technical proposals"? Your guess is as good as mine. Apparently the idea is to tell the various standards bodies what to do, which is not a mode of operation I believe they're accustomed to. Fortunately there's already some initaitives underway with traditional standards bodies that I'll talk about later (and more in the pipeline) so that won't be necessary.

Reuven goes on to acknowledge that there's a number of different splinter groups trying to "get things done" (with some early successes I might add), offering up his "extensive global network of corporate sponsors & industry organizations" to "help you and your technical proposal get in front of the right people when the time is right"(?). He finishes up with a reference to the oh-so-standard-like unifiedcloud group who are having a meeting soon.

It all sounds good and it probably pacified a lot of people, but in reality nothing has changed. Reuven's claimed the group is open (it's not) and unmodereated (it is) and yet this is all I've been asking for the whole time - an unfettered communication channel so we can get on with getting some work done. When one of the only people actually doing something has to wait hours for each message while a troll can spam freely something is drastically wrong.

Basically until Enomaly and CCIF either deliver on cloud computing open source and open standards respectively or get out of the way and let the rest of us I'm going to be here to draw attention to their shenanigans and tomfoolery as and when it happens. Stating that the forum is "professional, open and unmoderated" when it is so obviously, provably not is particularly disingenuous. That said it doesn't hold a candle to downplaying critical vulnerabilities or concealing them altogether (2.2.1 contained a second attempt at fixing CVE-2008-4990 and CVE-2009-0390) and then moderating the vulnerability annoucement!

Update: Since this post the spammer has given up (or has he?), Reuven's sent a postcard from Sweden (resulting in more noise in Swedish and a pair of posts about sick children) as well as pushing his mate's new offering (which incidentally looks quite good) and the Unified Cloud Interface (UCI) bunch led by Pat Wendorf (one of Enomaly's minions) has held a meeting with all of three attendees (two vendors pushing their private cloud offerings and another vendor pushing an unfortunately named "Cloud API" OGF group that might actually get something done) talking about a cut-back demo that might be semi-functional in 3 weeks to "attract some good minds" aka free labour.

Conspicuously absent from all of this noise are the various posts about the new Cloud Standards Group work on cloud platforms which have had ample time to be approved by the various moderators of this "professional, open and unmoderated" group. Yet more proof that the CCIF is a complete and utter vendor-driven farce and why RSA just jumped on this sinking ship is beyond me.