Cloud functions want to certify

Start of the Open Cloud Initiative (Open Cloud Initiative) is officially announced on Tuesday, within assistance to adoption of the principles of open "cloud". It happened after in 2009 the initiative was created and after that is few times broken.

Sam Ramji, the vice president for the strategy of Apigee company and the board member of OCI, reported that OCI is going to provide a set of provisions which define: what does "cloud" really open. OCI already issued the project called the Open Principles of the Cloud and from this point within 30 days, on the project comments and notes are accepted.

According to Ramdzhi, the Initiative differs from other acting groups on creation of open "clouds". "We are different, but are pleasantly similar to something like OpenStack which is a game of the clean technologies estimated in terms of the software and code lines, - he told. - OCI works at higher level. It is set the politician". The group abstracts concerning technologies and business models so the services certified according to its principles can be on the basis of an open source code, owned, commercial or not commercial, he told.

One of examples of types of functions for which OCI is going to determine parameters - ease of data movement from service in service. Some service providers do for clients very easy loading of a huge number of data in a cloud environment of storage, but then they impose restriction of speed for data movement which complicates to the user data transfer in other service. "It is barriers to an input and an exit", - Ramdzhi told.

It also otmezhevat OCI from the Open Manifesto of the Cloud (Open Cloud Manifesto), the controversial document which was created by several companies in 2009. "The manifesto - accessory of the vendors trying with advantage for themselves to use the term "open", without giving definitions - what is it, excepting their statements that they are open, and [excepting] some well-known suppliers in this process", - Ramdzhi emphasized.

In the long list of the companies which signed the Open Manifesto of the Cloud: IBM, Sybase, Heroku and Hewlett-Packard. But the lack of some other, like Microsoft and Amazon is remarkable. Being discharged of development of the document, Microsoft showed discontent.

One more distinctive feature of OCI is that it – initiative community. "It is the persons acting on behalf of community in a lead over vendors", - Ramdzhi told.

As soon as the group decides on the principles of openness, it will begin certification of services on compliance. It will be testing of services data entry, their removal, movement and use of the known API (application programming interface) for data access. Initially, this process will be performed on a voluntary basis by associates. Nevertheless, according to Ramdzhi, some "quite large vendors" showed interest in an initiative so the group hopes to receive, eventually, means for creation of more official certification process.

After the foundation in 2009 work of OCI stopped twice as its founder, Sam Johnston, changed work. Now he is a head cloud and IT services in Equinix. However board members of the Initiative think that time for active actions came. "We are in a critical point when implementation of "clouds" happens much quicker, and people add more and more data to cloud services, than we observed earlier so now the critical moment in order that to issue everything officially", - Shanley Kane, the head on communications with Apigee developers and the member of council of OCI told.

Nevertheless, the group can encounter resistance from the acting suppliers of cloud services long ago. "Someone should remind me for what we need one more cloudstandards.org? What changed this time? Why we should worry?" - Reuven Cohen, the founder of cloud provider of Enomaly wrote on Twitter on Tuesday, with reference to start of OCI. He was one of authors of the Open Manifesto of the Cloud.