Reuven Cohen's "Elastic Vapor" Blog

A few months ago a number of us came together to create "The Cloud Computing Interoperability Forum". The purpose of this group is to discuss the creation of a common cloud computing interface. The group is made up of a some of the largest cloud related vendors and startups who all share the goal of cloud interoperability as well reducing cross cloud complexity.

I'd like to take a moment to explain my cloud interoperability ideas. After various conversations, our concept is starting to take shape and is based on what I'm called the "unified cloud interface" (aka cloud broker). The cloud broker will serve as a common interface for the interaction with remote platforms, systems, networks, data, identity, applications and services. A common set of cloud definitions will enable vendors to exchange management information between remote cloud providers.

The unified cloud interface (UCI) or cloud broker will be composed of a specification and a schema. The schema provides the actual model descriptions, while the specification defines the details for integration with other management models. UCI will be implemented as an extension to the Extensible Messaging and Presence Protocol (XMPP) specifically as a XMPP Extension Protocol or XEP.

Reuven Cohen being interviewed on SYS-CON.TV at the 1st International Cloud Computing Conference & Expo in San Jose, CA, by Conference Chair Jeremy Geelan.

The unified cloud model will address both Platform as a service offerings such as Google App Engine, Azure and Force.com as well as infrastructure cloud platforms such as Amazon EC2. Ultimately this model will enable a decentralized yet extensible hybrid cloud computing environment with a focus on secure global asynchronous communication.

Once we are in general agreement on the draft proposal, it will be submitted for approval by the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) for inclusion as a XMPP Extension and presented at the IEEE International Workshop on Cloud Computing (Cloud 2009) being held in May 18-21, 2009, in Shanghai, China.

My draft is based on a combination of working being done in conjunction to XMPP, CIM, Xam and several other standardization efforts.

Comments welcome.

• Solving the Problem of Cloud Interoperability
• Introducing Semantic Cloud Abstraction & The UCI Working Group
• The State of the Cloud Computing Interoperability Forum