If you’ve been watching cloud computing at all, you’ve undoubtedly seen the whole brouhaha
over the Open Cloud manifesto. I won’t recount it here, mostly because
– frankly – I can’t tell what’s actually going on there anymore. So and
so said one thing, while thanking so and so, who declined to comment on
three organizational….BLECH!
What I will say is this: Gluecon, as you all know by now,
is not YACCE (yet another cloud computing event). We’ve got plenty of
YACCE’s and 90% of them will be dead within 18 months (bet on it). But,
cloud computing the topic is a big part of what we want to talk about
at Glue (even if it’s only one part). And, now that I’ve seen several
people and articles mention the idea that this whole open cloud
brouhaha points to the need for a “formalization of the standards
process” around cloud computing, I want to throw in my 2 cents.
First, a quick caveat: I’m not an engineer. If pushed, I
can stretch my limits of programming into writing one line of code for
active server pages. As such, I’ve never sat on a body that writes
standards. I have, however, been involved with them (I was an active
member of the Liberty Alliance for some time), and have been an
observer of “standards” for some time. The “standards” that inform my
thoughts on this include things like RSS, XML (or more properly,
XML-RPC), all of the liberty alliance specs, jabber (xmpp), OpenID, XRI
and XRD (now XRDS, or something), and the mess that was/is WS-*.
That said, h
ere’s my part-gut feel, part observer experience of it all:
“Formalizing the standards process” only ever does one thing well — SLOW DOWN ADOPTION.
That is not to say that formalized standards processes
(and bodies) don’t have their place. They do. But they shouldn’t be
formalized at too early a stage, as they do only one thing really well
(say it with me) — SLOW DOWN ADOPTION. The reason they slow down
adoption is really quite simple — if I’m an “enterprise guy” that’s
looking at adopting cloud stuff, I don’t want to have to adopt things 3
or 4 times because my budgets are scarce, my time is even more scarce,
and screwing up something like this will get me fired. As soon as some
group of vendors says, “we’re forming a body to formalize the standards
process,” my reaction as the enterprise guy is to say — “whoa, brakes
time!” As it’s much easier for me to delay my adoption by 6, 12 or 18
months. And I can do so under the rational thought process of — “by
waiting, I’ll ensure I adopt a standard.”
Of course, there’s not a single cloud vendor on the planet that wants to see adoption of their products slow down.
So what’s a cloud vendor to do? Realize that it’s not about “formalizing standards,” it’s about driving adoption.
RSS didn’t succeed because it was standardized. It
succeeded because it was adopted. The same thing goes for XMPP. And the
inverse hold true as well – organizations like the liberty alliance
have ended up largely giving in to other standards because theirs
weren’t being adopted in the ways they’d hoped for. Similarly, there’s
an awful lot of heat around OpenID, and folks there will claim adoption
— but we have yet to really see it ignite.
My point is: real “standards” come about through adoption first, and a formalized process second. Not the other way around.
Notably, Amazon, Google, Salesforce.com and Microsoft are
among those absent from the open cloud manifesto. Does that pose an
“adoption problem?”– oh yea.
Look, the big guys are gonna jockey for position, and I
don’t care WHAT they say, they’re always going to want to preserve some
sort of angle for themselves. Always. That’s the nature of the beast.
Without a “formalized standards process” will the cloud
go through a proliferation of differing “standards” and a period of
confusion and lock-in? Of course. But I’d still argue that going that
route leads to faster adoption than formalizing the standards process
too early.
Am I wrong? Well, we’re gonna find out (and you can show up at Glue and tell me so – use discount code spkr09 for $100 off).
(Cross-posted from the Glue conference blog.)
Nice post Eric and a good debate for any panel too. What is the correct approach? Standards First or Adoption First. Good topic for people to ponder.
Although I agreed with you a year ago, the time is ripe for standardisation efforts.
A proprietary API is making advances as a defacto standard for cloud infrastructure and as such we could be staring down the barrel of another era not unlike the Microsoft monopoly.
As an aside, I am finding the quality of CloudAve posts to have dropped off somewhat recently. This is the second post that has recently had me wondering what I am doing here.
Sam