Cloud computing Standard Foundation issued, OVF specification elected

In order to achieve this new model of cloud computing, it is necessary to develop an interoperability of IT management standards, while the Open virtualization Format (OVF) standards for this work provides a good foundation.

Standard: Key to open cloud computing door

VMware Company Standard Architecture director Winston Bumpus

The wave of cloud computing is sweeping. By providing a flexible, self-service IT infrastructure, cloud computing has revolutionized the way information is processed. In this transformation, virtualization technology plays a decisive role. Its independence, high degree of integration and mobility, changing the current IT infrastructure, processes, and costs, and by eliminating the barriers that persist between the application layer and the physical host, makes deployment easier and more mobile, with significantly increased mobility of the workload. It can be said that there is no virtualization of the cloud is unimaginable.

However, there is still a hurdle to be overcome in the real transition from traditional computing to cloud computing. Currently launched a variety of cloud computing solutions, due to the technical standards of connecting a variety of computer systems, maintenance of the normal operation of cloud computing software technology standards, etc., so that users in the choice of specific programs unavoidably confused, which greatly limits the spread of cloud computing and promotion. Therefore, the development of industry interoperability standards has become the current cloud computing is the biggest challenge.

Standard constraints

The industry's definition of cloud computing is numerous. Referring to the definition of the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), cloud computing is "a pay-as-you-go model for accessing resource-sharing pools on a portable, on-demand network, with minimal consumption management costs and service providers collaborating to obtain configurable, reliable, fast-provisioning and publishing computing resources, such as networks, servers , storage, application, service, etc. ".

For cloud computing usage patterns, the industry has also proposed three different concepts: Software as a service (Software-as-a-service, SaaS), platform as a service (Platform-as-a-service, PAAs) and infrastructure as services (Infrastructure-as-a-service, IaaS). SaaS is a web-based software leasing model; PAAs is the development of customized, hosted web system applications, IaaS refers to the server, storage and computing capacity of the use of "pay-for-use" mode, both inside and outside the firewall can be effectively obtained, respectively, corresponding to each other independent internal cloud and external cloud. A virtual private cloud that spans both internal and external clouds will become a reality if there is a standard between the internal cloud and the external cloud to enable the two to manage together, and it will help the enterprise gain all the benefits of cloud computing.

The growing demand for flexibility, usability, and performance makes it more important for IT management standards. Deploying systems, tools, and solutions that support management standards will help reduce the complexity of system administration and reduce the total cost of ownership of it. However, there is a general lack of interoperability standards between the current internal and external clouds, resulting in the inability of internal resources and available external resources to implement effective connections. At the same time, users are afraid to choose cloud providers because they are generally concerned that huge investments in proprietary tools, formats, and infrastructure do not yield the expected return. As a result, the lack of standards leads to cloud computing's inability to release its full potential.

In order to achieve this new model of cloud computing, it is necessary to develop, adopt and promote an interoperability of IT management standards. Only in this way, users can safely choose cloud technology to obtain on-demand flexibility. It will also enable it technology vendors to focus on improving functionality, reliability, and performance without having to focus on formatting, proxies, and protocols.

Create OVF Standard

To describe the maturity of the infrastructure, Gartner specializes in creating a model for implementing a dynamic IT infrastructure. The model is divided into five levels, the first layer is centralized and standardized, the third layer is virtualization and portability, the fifth layer is the IT infrastructure into a business automation platform, the ultimate implementation of "infrastructure as a service." Thus, in order to achieve the ultimate business flexibility, both the need for virtualization technology for portability and related standards for interoperability to more comprehensively manage the entire business infrastructure, so that users do not have to manage all the elements of the IT infrastructure as in the past, simply by leveraging a series of simple tools to manage, Control the computing infrastructure and automate the entire infrastructure, enabling it to deliver high levels of business agility.

Today, the industry has established a standard, portable metadata model that makes it possible to deploy virtual machines across virtualized platforms. Independent software Developers (ISVs), through testing and development, can encapsulate applications with the operating system and perform virtual machine authentication. The virtual machine quickly transforms into a product as a pre-configured, pre-packaged unit without any external dependencies, which is certainly attractive. This pre-deployment, ready to run, encapsulated virtual machine (VM) application is called a virtual device. To make this virtual device more widely available, virtual machines and metadata encapsulation must be done on a vendor-independent standard, enabling any virtualization platform to automatically and securely install, configure, and run virtual devices.

This open virtualization Format (OVF) standard, released by the Distributed Management Task Force (DMTF), offers many advantages: an effective user experience, simplified installation, a standalone, flexible virtualization platform for users, and easy creation of complex, pre-configured, multi-level services Efficient delivery of enterprise software through portable virtual machines, enhanced performance of specific platforms, and easier adoption of virtualization technology through scalability.

OVF and Cloud Interoperability

In April 2009, DMTF announced the creation of an organization named "Open Cloud computing standards incubator" to collaborate in the development, validation, upgrading and adoption of system management standards to meet the requirements of cloud computing for open management standards and to develop a range of specifications for cloud resource management.

The organization's core mission is to expand the OVF, making it easier to deploy and manage workloads in cloud computing environments such as internal cloud, external cloud, and private cloud. At present, OVF has been widely supported by the industry and deployed in a number of products. As a virtualization solution provider, VMware's many products and solutions also provide broad support for OVF, such as VMware Studio, a tool specifically designed to create OVF devices.

In addition to extending OVF, it is also necessary to develop an application programming interface (API) protocol for cloud computing. Although there are already many excellent APIs, but it should also focus on developing universally applicable APIs that provide both the management of workloads in cloud computing and the ability to provide fault tolerance, configuration, billing, performance enhancement, and security management, including quality of service (QoS) monitoring and control, and billing information retrieval in standard mode. In addition, security requirements specification and security management are critical components that are urgently needed to standardize to help ensure that workloads are deployed in a secure environment.

Adherence to infrastructure management standards is an important prerequisite for reducing overall it complexity. The development of standards will greatly improve interoperability and reduce the management tools required for IT systems. Moreover, managing the entire computing architecture as a whole will greatly reduce the current complexity problem. At the same time, by reducing training and specialized product requirements, users will be given sufficient choice of autonomy, greatly reducing costs.