Inter-Cloud Rock, Paper, Scissors: Service Brokers, Semantic Web or APIs? by DAM News Staff

July 29, 2009

…each cloud is a system unto itself. There is no way to express the idea of exchanging information between distinct computing clouds because there is no way to express the idea of “another cloud.” Nor is there any way to describe the information that is to be exchanged. Moreover, if the information contained in one computing cloud is protected from access by any but authorized users, there is no way to express how that protection is provided and how information about it should be propagated to another cloud when the data is transferred.”

A very interesting philosophical and market trajectory arms race is quietly ramping while the rest of the world tries to ping together how the Kindle will kill Cloud Computing and how Twitter already has.

As @Jamesurquhart and I spend our time exploring the longer term evolution ofCloud Computing, we end up in orbit around the notion of the Inter-Cloud (or Intercloud, or InterCloud)

Inter-Cloud represents one vision that describes how Clouds of many types will interoperate, federate and provide for workload portability as well as how those that provide these services and those that consume them, will interact. You can see an interesting summary of these issues here in a fellow colleague’s post titled: “From India to Intercloud”

In the broadest sense, Cloud is being positioned in the long term to allow for true utility. This means that at a 30,000 foot view, consumers should be able to declare their business and technology requirements for workloads or application needs and TAMO! (then a miracle occurs,) that workload or application presents itself operating somewhere that meets those needs backed up by some form of attestation by the provider. Ultimately, I’d like to see a common way of auditing and validating those attestations. Apropos for this discussion,I bring up the notion of an API