There are an increasing number of discussions, many of which have come about after announcements about interoperability and open source projects, which revolve around the need for standardization of the cloud. Several industry and other groups have set forth to define such standards but there are so many different groups involved, all with the same basic philosophy, that real progress cannot be made until there is greater unity. One of the more promising projects to work toward the goals of cloud standards just released some new and updated materials, however, that might bring more groups into the cloud standards fold.
Last year the Distributed Management Task Force (DMTF) launched the Open Cloud Standards Incubator with the goal of bringing together relevant parties to agree on open management standards in the cloud. The group initially set forth some foundational ideas and they have just extended their work by producing two new pieces for review, including “Use Cases and Interactions for Managing Clouds” as well as “Architecture for Managing Clouds.” These new papers, along with their ongoing workshop series, seek to define and standardize a number of related cloud issues, including cloud service management models and cloud security (via their affiliation with the Cloud Security Alliance). The group also has extensive discussion on the Open Virtualization Format, which is detailed in the most recent updates to their paper series.