First let's set expectations:
- I've given up hope of seeing any deliverables today. The closest thing perhaps is this UCI EC2<->ECP PoC and I don't see that as particularly interesting (I still haven't worked out what it is). That's disappointing after 6+ months but ok, we have what we have - no point crying over spilt milk when you don't walk away with whatever you had anticipated. Some draft documents (charter etc.) or even notes would be a deliverable of sorts and good inputs for the stage of actual formalisation.
- I don't expect to see any firm decisions made today. The group in New York is an (unbalanced?) subset of the CCIF that doesn't constitute a quorum (170 of 815 or ~20%, not all of whom aren't going to be members). It normally takes weeks to even start a working group and this is an arbitrary, self-assigned deadline... we can afford a brief window of discussion following this meeting and this doesn't have to be set in stone in order to produce useful work (despite FUD about IP problems which would be easily resolved by a click-through agreement). My intention here is that concise proposal(s) for charters et al be presented for refinement and ratification as would normally be the case rather than "shooting from the hip" with shows of hands and other subjective malarky. We've waited a year so another week to get it right won't hurt.
- I don't expect to see any announcements as we have nothing to announce (we don't, and if we do then seriously, what the FOCC were you guys doing running around behind our backs?). I definitely don't want to read about this event in the press, except perhaps in the context of a bunch of people coming together to make apple pie and discuss the form[alis]ation of a cloud computing interoperability and/or advocacy group.
In many ways we're lucky to even have the opportunity to mould the process as there is no doubt whatsoever in my mind that were it not for ManifestoGate (already reported as an alliance) followed closely by the revealing of AllianceGate in A thinly veiled warning to the CCIF "committee"... then we'd have been going to see a[nother] pronouncement from Power Ranger Reuven about his long-running pet project, the Cloud Computing Alliance. I have a strong feeling that, while the "alliance" moniker may have been dropped the key elements (and in particular the stakeholders) remain. There's been a lot (too much IMO) of talk about the financial side of things, especially considering the amount of success often tends to be inversely proportional to the size of the budget, if web site sexiness is any indication (no offense):
I'm not disputing that we need some resources, but I'd much rather see us work out what it is we're doing and how it will be structured before starting to talk about who is going to fund it - the other way around is putting the cart before the horse and results in the early entrants having a significant advantage over the late ones (in the extreme case resulting in "founding" members being burnt into the DNA while others have to fight to stay involved, as was the case with WS-I). The Cloud Computing Community project has run on the smell of an oily rag and that approach is certainly one option for us which would eliminate any question of biases etc. Then you've got the shoestring-budget Cloud Camps which are wildly successful thanks in no small part to Dave (who tracks them around the globe and who I've developed a lot of respect for over the course of a series of conversations). In any case it would be better if the resulting group funded by sponsorships and events rather than membership fees if it's going to be truly open, as it well should be. The work that's been done in this regard is commendable and any potential sponsors who have offered support in the absence of something concrete are appreciated - thankyou.
Assuming we've decided we do need money, have some idea of how much and what we're planning to use it for (drawing up a rough budget would be an insightful exercise for today, including niggling details like roles and salaries) we then need to start thinking about where it will come from. Power Ranger Jesse has been transparent about wanting this to be a big budget affair, which suggests to me that a big budget has already been tabled. He was also quite adament about not needing assistance in the form of new Power Rangers which is something I think should be addressed today. There are plenty of people floating around with more relevant experience than both of us combined (and I've been working with various committees for the last decade or so) who have offered to be involved and I'd consider throwing my hat in the ring to help with building out the community (having done so already at Citrix). Putting together a list of potential participants would be a useful exercise too. Following the meritocracy model which has been so successful for open source organisations like the Apache Software Foundation with a light governance layer would be arguably more sensible than many of the alternatives but in any case looking at how different (successful) organisations are structured is an essential step.
The very last thing we need here though is a WS-I style CC-Deathstar, and I'm not the first to draw the comparison - see Out of Order 2.0 (about us) which follows on from Out of Order (about WS-I). Power Ranger Reuven's connections with IBM were clarified by manifestogate (plus they're drinking buddies), his link(s) to Cisco are bleeding obvious and Intel have recently stepped into the fray after being referenced on his blog. He's almost certainly stretched Microsoft's patience by calling them liars (then again he's also been burning bridges with Christopher Hoff from the Cloud Security Alliance, and essentially told me to FOCC off and do my own thing too, despite being one of the few active participants without blatantly obvious biases). OTOH you've got Amazon too who were recently interfaced to UCI (I'm not sure whether to make anything of that) but I expect the incumbents (Amazon, Google, Microsoft, Salesforce) to arms-length all this for now. This could (and hopefully will) change quickly if we get our act together. Finally there's also representatives from other $bigco's but it's not clear who is and who is not in Power Ranger Reuven's "Inner Circle" (I know I'm not, at least not yet, though things are improving). On the off chance that there was already an announcement to make around this following back-room negotiations I'd suggest sitting on it until we've locked down exactly what it is we're doing.
Finally you've got IEEE-ISTO, "a federation of programs that works to standardize technical implementations that span the spectrum of today’s electro-technologies" who are one of a number of groups who may be able to help us with organisational infrastructure. Their standards focus adds a tinge of WS-I and makes them the black sheep of the bunch given (in @ruv's eyes at least) CCIF is "a thought forum and advocacy group for cloud interoperability and related standards, it is NOT to be a standards body". This curious connection is probably another topic for discussion today as in my opinion there are better options out there who offer more in terms of existing members from both customer and vendor sides of the fence. In the very least there should be an open process to assess all the options, as there is value in relying on existing infrastructure so as to "hit the ground running" rather than trying to reinvent the wheel (albeit at a cost).
Anyway I hope you all have a good and productive day, aren't too hungover from CloudCamp (which sounded great from what I've heard) and that we get a good result at the end of it. Even if we don't there's many alternatives for us and no hard deadline.
0 comments:
Post a Comment