Tuesday, March 10, 2009

Reaffirming the CCIF Goals and Mission

Over the last six months the Cloud Computing Interoperability Forum has grown from a handful of participants interested in cloud interoperability to become one of the most vocal and visible cloud advocacy groups. In some of the recent conversations it seems to have become unclear to what our goals and objects are, so I thought I'd take a moment to restate our mission.

The goal of the CCIF is to be a thought forum and advocacy group for cloud interoperability and related standards, it is NOT to be a standards body.

To accomplish this goal, our mission is three fold.

1) Free, in person events like Cloud Camp and the Wall Street / Mountain View & Washington Cloud Interoperability Forums.
2) A community site for professional, open and unmoderated discussion, relating to cloud computing interoperability
3) A place to incubate actual working groups doing real technical proposals for specific areas of the cloud computing interoperability. We should encourage these proposals to target submission for consideration to an existing standards or industry organization if one exists.

Recently some of you have gone out and created various secondary groups in an attempt to "get things done". We encourage this and hope to support the various efforts in anyway we can. One of the benefits of CCIF and CloudCamp is our extensive network of corporate sponsors & industry organizations we bring to the forum. Simply, we can help you and your technical proposal get in front of the right people when the time is right.

I also agree with the comments that we should think about the key challenges for cloud interoperability and identify "actionable" specific sub-areas to work on, and how they fit into supporting specific uses cases of interoperability. To that end lets identify use cases, and identify the technical areas that need to be addressed to enable those use cases. Details on both the use cases themselves, and the technical areas themselves, should be what we encourage the workgroups to progress, with the eye to head this towards existing standards bodies.

If you are interested in getting involved in something other then "talk", we would suggest joining the Unified Cloud Interface Project at http://groups.google.com/group/unifiedcloud Our first group meeting is this Thursday March 12th at 12 noon EDT (9 PDT,4/5/6pm across Europe) and will be held in a XMPP ([email protected]) chat room. For anyone not able to attend, logs will be available at http://talk.cloudforum.org

To help illustrate some of the opportunities & challenges, we've put together a diagram outlining some of the interoperability areas we see within the wider cloud community. These challenges include Management, Endpoints, Communications, Infrastructure, Platform, and Physical. Please see the PDF document. We look forward to your comments and suggestions.

(P.S, I'm off to Stockholm for the rest of the week, so if I don't respond right away, you'll know why)

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