Cloud Computing need some regulations???

Question

I was involved in couple of cloud computing platform recently.

First of all please note that I am not trying to criticize any platform.

Cloud computing is large area but to make my point simple and understandable. Let me come up with very simple scenario and that is data storage services hosted on the cloud. If you take any storage service like Amazon EC2, SQL Data Service(SDS), Salesforce.com services.

If you want to consume any of such data storage service platform goal of all such service are same and that is to serve requested data on demand. Without warring about how it store and where it stored and who is maintaining it etc... (all cloud goodies)

Now my area of concern is the way ANSI-SQL regulated platform venders to make sure they follow similar language across all the product can’t they regulate similar concept across service providers?

Why no such initiatives??

Any thoughts appreciated

Answer 1

I think that this emerging cloud computing initiative is just too young in order to have standards.

Service providers right now just worry about rushing into the market, rather than interoperability and standards.

Later on, when the situation is more established, some common guidelines may emerge. But there is still a long way to go.

Answer 2

It seems to me like you're worried about vendor lock-in with cloud computing. I may be naive but I would normally choose technologies and then go look for cloud vendors that'd be able to deliver these technologies. And if I was aiming for a "write once run anywhere approach" I'd have to select technology that'd make this as realistic as possible.

With the fairly rapid speed of development I really think standardization committees would struggle to keep up. ANSI-SQL has had 20 + years of history. It seems to me like you're requesting for standardization long before we even know what the cloud is up to....

Answer 3

You seem to be asking specifically about cloud storage services, rather than cloud computing in general. So your Amazon example would be S3, not EC2.

I think the field is a little young to be standardising on an API just yet. The services differentiate themselves in ways which rule this out. For example, S3 trades sophistication for scalability/reliability/performance: you can't do a complex SQL LIKE query. You can store and retrieve blobs of data based on a key, and that's about it.

I think as such services become more and more the mainstream way to do things, standards will emerge. Users will want the freedom to switch providers on a whim, move their data around, test against free local storage, etc.

The APIs used are all based on Web Standards already. Making an abstraction layer to make them look the same is fairly trivial.