Analysis of the Organization of Cloud Computing Alliance

Participants and progress of cloud computing standards may be due to antitrust reasons or their own lack of strength, and no company will put forward the standards alone. Rather, they propose standards through some coalition organizations. As mentioned above, because cloud computing is an industry change and has a huge industrial chain, different standards will be put forward. They may overlap or have an emphasis.

The goal of the CSA (Virtualization Alliance for Cloud Computing) is to provide a hands-on guide to cloud computing security assurances and provide guidance on how to safely leverage cloud computing. DMTF (Distributed Management Working Group) is committed to standardizing interoperability and security mechanisms by opening up cloud computing standard incubators. ETSI (European Telecommunications Standards Institute) is committed to the integration of information technology and telecommunications issues. NIST (National Institute of Standards and Technology) is committed to the concept of cloud computing. OGF (Open Grid Computing Forum) proposes IaaS interface standards through the OCCI (Open Cloud Computing Interface) Working Group. OMG (Object Management Working Group) is committed to modeling and deploying applications and services on the cloud. SNIA (Storage Networking Industry Association) has developed a cloud storage system architecture through the cloud storage technology working group and hopes to lead the development of a series of cloud storage-related standards. OCC (Open Cloud Computing Alliance) is mainly to support the development of cloud computing standards for interaction between different clouds, as well as to develop a cloud computing test benchmark to support open source cloud computing. CCIF (Cloud Computing Interoperability Forum) has proposed a common cloud computing interface to shield different infrastructure services interface.

Many standards are in the early stages of development. The current progress is mainly on some principle issues. The first is a core set of cloud computing standards: to ensure that cloud integration, cloud application migration, data apologies to be safe; to avoid the curb to innovate in the specification; describe different cloud computing models. The first step might be to focus on IaaS standards and then research PaaS-related standards and other security and data privacy standards.

IaaS standard introduction

Standards regarding IaaS focus on the following aspects: virtual machine image distribution, virtual machine deployment and control, communication between virtual machines within the cloud, persistent storage, virtual machine service level standards, and secure virtual machine configuration. However, the current standards for IaaS still seldom discuss some issues besides infrastructure virtual machines and persistent storage such as virtual routers and switches, virtual firewalls, virtual load balancers, collocation of virtual facilities and physical facilities.

Currently mature in the field of iaaS may become a common standard of OVF DMF, OGF OGFI, SNIA's CDMI. CSA's security cloud computing guidelines also have some reference. DMTF also seeks to include CIM and WBEM in cloud computing standards.

As the name suggests, the OVF is an open virtualization format that describes a secure, open, portable, efficient, and scalable format for packaging and distributing software that runs on virtual machines. Key features include: Easy to distribute; Simple, automated user experience; Single VM and multi-VM deployment; Portable virtual machine packaging; Vendor-independent and platform-independent; Scalable and easy to localize. An OVF contains the following: an OVF descriptor file suffixed with ovf; 0 or 1 OVF manifest file suffixed with mf; 0 or 1 OVF certificate file with cert suffix; 0 or more disk mirroring files ; 0 or more resource files, such as iso images. The following figure is the use of OVF schematic.

OCCI provides an extended Restful API. Each resource is identified by the same resource identifier. Resources through a set of operations (establishment, access, update, delete) to control the establishment of operational use POST request Get operation Get request, update or create Put request, delete operation Delete request. In addition, the following HTTP requests are also used: COPY, HEAD, MOVE, OPTIONS. Three resources are currently manageable: storage, networking, computing. Putting these resources together, together with the necessary attributes, forms a virtual machine.

CDMI, the Cloud Data Management Interface, provides a specification for interoperable transport and management of data in a cloud storage environment. Companies involved in the development of the specification include: Bycast, Cisco, Ologic, Qlogic, SUN, XyRatex. Of course, SNIA's board of directors has more than just these companies. The figure below is CDMI cloud storage reference model:

This model shows the many types of cloud data storage interfaces that can support traditional and new applications. All interfaces allow storage to be provided and retrieved dynamically. Data Servcies are applied to individual data elements based on the metadata of the data. Metadata is the data requirement that builds on a single data element or sets of data elements.