Richard Davies wrote: The UK has a good crop of technology pioneers in cloud computing - for example ElasticHosts, FlexiScale, Flexiant, OnApp - and also some strong government initiatives such as G-Cloud.
We will have to see whether this kind of technical leadership converts into swift mass-market adoption or not.
So it would seem my cloud standardization post has hit a nerve with a few. So I would like to post a some follow on ideas I've had, since writing it.
First of all I'm also not totally sold on the whether or not cloud computing is ready for a cloud standard just yet. What I do think we need is a reference implementation (Platform & Infrastructure) and common extensible API - "CloudVirt"
This API may someday form the basis for a standard, but in the meantime gives us a uniform API to work against, so whether you're using Google App Engine or Force.com, GoGrid or EC2, Nirvanix or S3, you'll have a central point of programmatic contact. I personally don't want to have to rewrite my platform for every new cloud provider's API, which is exactly what we're doing now.
Also a few people have point out the CIM (Common Information Model) could be a ideal starting point for a cloud API, for those who are unfamiliar, CIM is an open standard that defines how managed elements in an IT environment are represented as a common set of objects and relationships between them. This is intended to allow consistent management of these managed elements, independent of their manufacturer or provider.
About Reuven Cohen Reuven Cohen is Founder & CTO for Toronto based Enomaly Inc. - leading developer of Cloud Computing products and solutions focused on enterprise businesses. Enomaly's products include the Enomaly elastic computing platform, an open source cloud platform that enables a scalable enterprise IT and local cloud infrastructure platform. Cohen is a thought leader in the emerging cloud computing industry and maintains a blog at www.elasticvapor.com.