New initiative aims to certify open clouds

27.07.2011
After forming in 2009 and stalling a couple of times since, the Open Cloud Initiative formally launched on Tuesday in an effort to encourage the adoption of open cloud principles.

The Open Cloud Initiative plans to provide a set of principles that define what makes a cloud truly open, said Sam Ramji, vice president of strategy at Apigee and a board member of the OCI. It has already released a draft of what it calls the and has begun a 30-day period for comments on it.

The initiative is different from other existing efforts at building open clouds, Ramji said. "We're different but complimentary to something like OpenStack, which is a pure tech play that is measured in terms of software and lines of code," he said. "OCI operates at a higher level. It's a set of policies."

The group is agnostic with regard to technology and business models, so services that are certified compliant with the principles could be open source, proprietary, commercial or not commercial, he said.

One example of the types of functions for which the OCI plans to set parameters is the ease of moving data into and out of a service. Some service providers make it very easy for customers to upload massive amounts of data into a cloud storage environment, but then they impose a rate limit on removing data that would make it very difficult for the user to transfer it into another service, he said. "These are barriers to entry and exit," he said.

He also set the OCI apart from the . "The manifesto was an affiliation of vendors trying to use the term 'open' to their advantage without defining what it is, except by saying they were open and [excluding] some well-known vendors in the process," he said.