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Cloud Computing: What Does it Mean to Be an Open Cloud?
Enterprises have long been captives of traditional on-premise software. They’ve been trapped by vendors because the expense and difficulty of migrating to a competitor is not a viable alternative. So it comes as no surprise that as businesses gradually migrate data to the cloud that they’re wary about the potential of being locked into one vendor’s software for a long time. IDC reports that, for 72 percent of businesses, whether or not a cloud vendor uses open source, open standards and open APIs is a key criteria for them in choosing the cloud service. They’re looking for vendors that support what’s being called an ‘Open Cloud’.
But how do you know an Open Cloud when you see one?
Scott Crenshaw, vice president of Red Hat’s cloud business, says that the cloud solution needs to have the following criteria, as reported by Joe Brockmeier on RedWriteWeb:
- Open source
- Active community of users
- Based on open standards
- Based on software free of possible patent infringements
- Lets you deploy to your choice of infrastructure
- Pluggable, extensible and open API
- Enables portability across clouds
Alex Williams on TechCrunch added a few more characteristics of an Open Cloud solution:
- Does not require an IT administrator to provision and manage
- Does not require new hardware
- Is federated — you can run your apps and data across multiple cloud environments
- Can be forked.
- Has full view into the infrastructure environment.
Similar requirements for an Open Cloud are outlines in a document called the Open Cloud manifesto. But are these requirements realistic — at least in today’s world? Currently there are probably no cloud vendors today that can meet all these criteria for being an Open Cloud vendor.
Hopefully that’s something that will change.
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