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"... the standards should enable easy and complete data and service portability, and a high degree of interoperability between cloud services, in order to incre

"... the standards should enable easy and complete data and service portability, and a high degree of interoperability between cloud services, in order to increase rather than limit competitiveness." Come on HN, let's help the EU. Anyone got any great ideas? Because I don't even understand the question, much less what the answer would be. Edit: notice how everyone is just "assuming" what they mean. The problem is not well defined.

Svip 13y ago
I think they mean it should be easier to migrate from one operator to another. I am not familiar with the difficulty of that since I don't use any cloud services.
AndrewDucker 13y ago
That's kind of how I feel. How would you ensure service portability between Google App Engine (runs software, no access to the OS), AWS (Linux VMs) and Azure (Windows VMs)?
- anpalton 13y ago
  They are not seeking to ensure portability between different kinds of services (and Azure has Linux VMs by the way) But portability between, AWS, Google Compute, Azure, Rackspace, Softlayer, Nephoscale, Linode, Digital Ocean, etc would be quite beneficial.
acron0 13y ago
Perhaps they mean specifically consumer cloud/file services, a la Dropbox, SkyDrive, iCloud, Ubuntu One etc.
garblegarble 13y ago
There's been some work over the last 4 or so years on producing cloud abstractions to enable a multi-cloud approach (effectively trying to provide a sensible API that can work independently of a particular cloud provider). Projects like OCCI http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_Cloud_Computing_Interface http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_Cloud_Computing_Interface have published documents on how this would look Personally my take is that the proposed abstractions are too low level to be of genuine use as an abstraction layer across cloud providers - but I'm biased in that I was involved in the research and development of a higher-level abstraction that provided something closer towards a PaaS approach - roughly equivalent to provisioning an instance (with disks and networking as required) and configuring it with puppet (this was back in in 2007 though). The general attitude I've got from cloud providers when I spoke to them is that small providers like the idea of standards (reduces barrier to picking up their service) and big providers have no motivation to allow such mobility or multi-cloud use.
- thwarted 13y ago
  Personally my take is that the proposed abstractions are too low level to be of genuine use as an abstraction layer across cloud providers Yeah, what vagrant has been able to acomplish so far is an example of this. There are many features that only work on some providers, usually just VirtualBox, and the AWS support is largely limited to controlling instances (vs configuring them). I think it'll get there eventually, but there's not a lot of motivation/incentive from the established players.
freyfogle 13y ago
Well, as an example, here's a London based start-up that is working on providing an abstraction layer across cloud services. http://storagemadeeasy.com http://storagemadeeasy.com

Svip 13y ago

I think they mean it should be easier to migrate from one operator to another. I am not familiar with the difficulty of that since I don't use any cloud services.

AndrewDucker 13y ago

That's kind of how I feel. How would you ensure service portability between Google App Engine (runs software, no access to the OS), AWS (Linux VMs) and Azure (Windows VMs)?

anpalton 13y ago
They are not seeking to ensure portability between different kinds of services (and Azure has Linux VMs by the way) But portability between, AWS, Google Compute, Azure, Rackspace, Softlayer, Nephoscale, Linode, Digital Ocean, etc would be quite beneficial.

acron0 13y ago

Perhaps they mean specifically consumer cloud/file services, a la Dropbox, SkyDrive, iCloud, Ubuntu One etc.

garblegarble 13y ago

There's been some work over the last 4 or so years on producing cloud abstractions to enable a multi-cloud approach (effectively trying to provide a sensible API that can work independently of a particular cloud provider). Projects like OCCI http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_Cloud_Computing_Interface http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_Cloud_Computing_Interface have published documents on how this would look Personally my take is that the proposed abstractions are too low level to be of genuine use as an abstraction layer across cloud providers - but I'm biased in that I was involved in the research and development of a higher-level abstraction that provided something closer towards a PaaS approach - roughly equivalent to provisioning an instance (with disks and networking as required) and configuring it with puppet (this was back in in 2007 though). The general attitude I've got from cloud providers when I spoke to them is that small providers like the idea of standards (reduces barrier to picking up their service) and big providers have no motivation to allow such mobility or multi-cloud use.

thwarted 13y ago
Personally my take is that the proposed abstractions are too low level to be of genuine use as an abstraction layer across cloud providers Yeah, what vagrant has been able to acomplish so far is an example of this. There are many features that only work on some providers, usually just VirtualBox, and the AWS support is largely limited to controlling instances (vs configuring them). I think it'll get there eventually, but there's not a lot of motivation/incentive from the established players.

freyfogle 13y ago

Well, as an example, here's a London based start-up that is working on providing an abstraction layer across cloud services. http://storagemadeeasy.com http://storagemadeeasy.com