Cloud Computing Interoperability Forum Summary

On Wednesday September 24th, I hosted the first ever Cloud Computing Interoperability Forum at Orange Labs in South San Francisco. The event sponsored by Intel, Orange / France Telecom and Enomaly was a one-day meeting of major stakeholders active in cloud computing with an interest in the creation of cloud standardization and interoperability. The forum's goal was to define an organization that would enable interoperable enterprise-class cloud computing platforms through application integration and stakeholder cooperation.

When I originally proposed the cloud forum, my goal was to invite a select group of cloud consumers, vendors and cloud industry advocates. Like everything cloud related these days, the event exploded with more then 50 people signing up. Actually another 30 people requested entry but due to lack of space I needed to cap it. One of the coolest parts of the day was actually seeing my "social network" in person. (After the event a group of us met at Benihana's and someone noted they had never seen so many grey beards in one room) I really apprieciated that, I did actually go out of my way to invite the "heavy hitters" of the technology world and to my surprise they all showed up. (Thank you!, I am truly honoured)

The forum utilized an unconference format to facilitate a face-to-face participant-driven discussion. The day was primarily composed of group activities, brainstorming sessions and general cloud discussions.

We had a wide group representing a nice cross section of the emerging cloud industry and consumers. The participation included representatives from 3Tera, 10gen, Appistry, AppNexus, Citrix, Dell , Ebay, Elastra , Eli Lilly and Company, Enomaly, EMC, France Telecom / Orange, Gigaspaces, Gogrid, IBM, Intel, JP Morgan Chase, Oracle, Open Cloud Consortium, Open Grid Forum, Parallels, Rackspace / Mosso, Rightscale, RSA, Snaplogic, Sun, University of California / EUCALYPTUS, VMware, and Zeronines.

Areas like security, transparency and SLAs were the hot topics of the day. The workgroup on "Cloud API" was by far the most popular subject, with a preliminary taxonomy and API architecture drafted on the white board.

So did we reach a consensus? No, but we did all agree that we needed to investigate ways we could start working in a more "interoperable way". As well as to continue the discussion of common ways for us to interact with remote cloud platforms using a more uniformAPI.

The plan is to hold our next forum during SYS-CON's Cloud Computing Expo sometime during November 19-21 in San Francisco. If you're interesed in getting involved in the forum. Please go to the discussion group. (It's invite for the moment so give me a good reason and I'll add you)

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