Cloud Standards Roadmap

Almost a year ago in "Cloud Standards: not so fast..." I explained why standardisation efforts were premature. A lot has happened in the interim and it is now time to start intensively developing standards, ideally by deriving the "consensus" of existing implementations.

To get the ball rolling I've written a Cloud Standards Roadmap which can be seen as an authorative source for information spanning the various standardisation efforts (including identification of areas where effort is required).

Currently it looks like this:

Cloud Standards Roadmap
The cloud standards roadmap tracks the status of relevant standards efforts underway by established multi-vendor standards bodies.

Layer	Description	Group	Project	Status	Due
Client	?	?	?	?	?
Software (SaaS)	Operating environment	W3C	HTML 5	Draft	2008
	Event-driven scripting language	ECMA	ECMAScript	Mature	1997
	Data-interchange format	IETF	JSON (RFC4627)	Mature	2006
Platform (PaaS)	Management API	?	?	?	?
Infrastructure (IaaS)	Management API	OGF	Cloud Infrastructure API (CIA)	Formation	2009
	Container format for virtual machines	DMTF	Open Virtualisation Format (OVF)	Complete	2009
	Descriptive language for resources	DMTF	CIM	Mature	1999
Fabric	?	?	?	?	?

Other standards efforts

• Cloud Standards Group
  • Cloud Computing Reference Model
  • Cloud Computing Stack
  • Cloud Platform Reference Architecture
• CCIF UCI - A "singular programmatic point of contact that can encompass the entire infrastructure stack as well as emerging cloud centric technologies all through a unified interface"

Vendor-owned standards

• Infrastructure
  • Amazon EC2 API
  • AppNexus API
  • ElasticHosts API
  • Eucalyptus (which uses the Amazon EC2 API)
  • FlexiScale API
  • Globus Numbus (which uses the Amazon EC2 API and WSRF)
  • GoGrid API
  • OpenNebula API
  • SliceHost API
  • Sun Cloud APIs
• Fabric
  • F5 iControl (Networking)

Other resources

• Apache Tashi
• OASIS Reference Model for Service Oriented Architecture

Please check the Cloud Computing Community Wiki for the latest version as this information will be quickly dated. If you have any updates please feel free to contribute them.