Cloud Computing Interoperability Considerations

With the rapid development of cloud computing, the requirements of the market for enterprises become more and more stringent. The improvement in the technology sector's ability to innovate means that companies eventually reach a place where they can make informed it decisions, and truly leverage the advantages of a new generation of technology tools and management strategies to reduce risk and achieve long-term development. In this context, the interoperability of cloud computing has become a new bright spot in the market development. But there is no common standard about the interoperability of cloud computing, there are some problems needing attention.

Cloud Computing and vendor lock-in

As we all know, vendor lock-in is a major obstacle to cloud computing business models. It is characterized by a limited capacity to be incompetent or connected to resources, and this resource is not provided by the cloud. Applying migrations or matching data to alternative cloud services can be expensive and time-consuming, and users rely on vendor technology. If we want to avoid this obstacle, then we must find a way to achieve interoperability of cloud computing.

Everyone has its own API

All cloud vendors now like specific technology solutions and want to design remote-available methods (SOAP and rest APIs) themselves. For example, the APIs provided by Google Application engine, Oracle PAAs platform, Salesforce and Microsoft Azure are very different. Some manufacturers even try to invent new programming languages (such as Salesforce and its proprietary Apex language). In addition, the scope of the data storage model may range from NoSQL to relational development databases, vendors using their own query language, and they support different data types.

Standardization

Now, the cloud-computing standards that most commercial cloud providers accept are not. However, many initiatives are still active. The DMTF OCSI (Open Cloud Standards Research Group) standardizes Cloud Resource management. DMTF also proposes OVF (open Virtualization Format) specification to support open, secure, efficient, and extensible forms to package or distribute software that runs on virtual machines. OCCI-WG (Working Group on Open Cloud Computing interface) has developed the actual specification of infrastructure as a service. The SNIA CDMI (Cloud Data management Interface) may use cloud applications to create access, update, and modify data elements that are stored on the cloud. The OASIS TOSCA (topology and specification for cloud applications) aims to improve the portability of applications and IT services to the cloud.

Broker Library

One solution to solving cloud interoperability problems is to use brokers. There are some frameworks on the market that can be used as intermediary media:

Apache Libcloud is a python library that hides the differences between cloud vendor APIs, enabling it to manage different cloud resources through a unified API Deltacloud API is an application interface that abstracts the different Apache between clouds Jclouds is an open source library that uses a portability abstraction or cloud-specific features the Dasein Cloud API is inspired by JDBC, which provides an abstraction for applications that are abstracted from applications that want to be written independently of the cloud and can be controlled autonomously

Prototype of the research project

European research-funded institutions have become aware of the problem of interoperability in cloud computing. For example, FP7 has studied several projects with active issues:

Cloud4soa provides a unified API that allows seamless interconnection, allowing the application of mosaic for cloud programming across a variety of platforms--a standard apicontrail an Open-source cloud system designed for Cloud Federation vision Cloud solves the problem of data management in Cloud Alliance

The problem of cloud computing interoperability is far from resolved, but there are reliable solutions before cloud standards mature and are adopted by most cloud providers.