Open Cloud Initiative to restart the Open Cloud Principles program

After being established in 2009 and pausing two times, the Open Cloud Initiative (OCI) recently launched a plan to encourage the adoption of the Open Cloud Principle (OCP).

Sam Ramji, vice president of Apigee Strategy and OCI board member, said the OCI plan provided a set of principles to define the basic meaning of true cloud openness. OCI has drafted an open cloud principle and has started a 30-day consultation period.

The initiative is different from any other existing effort to build an open cloud, Ramji said, "Although we are different from others, we admire things like OpenStack." OpenStack is a pure technical action in terms of software and lines of code, and OCI has a set of policies to run at a higher level. ”

Ramji adds that OCI is agnostic in terms of technology and business models, so the services that are certified and aligned with the open cloud Principles can be open source or proprietary, commercial or non-commercial.

An example of this type of functionality is that the OCI program sets parameters to make it easier for data to be moved in and out of service. Ramji added that while some service providers could make it fairly easy for users to send large amounts of data to the cloud storage environment, they set limits on the speed at which they moved data, which made it particularly difficult for users to move data to other services, thus making the migration of data a barrier.

Ramji also distinguishes OCI from the controversial Open Cloud computing Manifesto (Open Cloud Manifesto), which was released in 2009 by more than 10 companies. "The Open Cloud computing manifesto is just a client of the vendors who use the term open for their own benefit." Apart from claiming that they are open and excluding some well-known manufacturers, they do not define what the true meaning of openness is. ”

Many companies, including IBM, Sybase, Heroku and Hewlett-Packard, have signed up to open cloud computing, but other vendors such as Microsoft and Amazon have been conspicuously absent – Microsoft has expressed strong dissatisfaction with the exclusion of this document.

Another unique feature of OCI is the design of a Community initiative. Ramji added: "This is a personal act, and there is no vendor to influence our community interests." ”

Once OCI has developed the open cloud principle, it will begin to authenticate the services that match it. This requires testing services by entering data, moving data, using the available application design interfaces (APIs) to access data. Initially, the process will be conducted on the basis of volunteer service by community members. However, Ramji said that some "larger providers" had expressed strong interest in the initial testing process, so OCI hoped to eventually get funding to implement a more formal full-time certification process.

As the open Cloud Initiative's creator Sam Johnston changed jobs, OCI was suspended two times since its establishment in 2009. Johnston is now chairman of the Equinix Cloud and IT services. But OCI's board members believe it is a good time to continue the initiative. "We have come to a tipping point: cloud services are being used more and more, and people are adding much more data to the cloud services," said OCI, director of Apigee's developer relations Division, Shanley Kane. It is therefore a critical moment to form a formal initiative. ”