Alexis, I found this very enlightening. I think making the distinction between interop and integration is very important. In retrospect, I can now see that while many here have been talking about integration, I've solely been focused on interop. I agree that it is critical to get that piece functional ASAP and then begin working on the integration components. In fact, I'm even more excited now about the prospect of a very small core that could be adopted rapidly across many providers. This would go very far towards encouraging wider adoption much faster, I believe. GoGrid has folks approaching us now who are curious about who they should build to first and for many of them Amazon's APIs are the best bet because they are the de facto leader. Unfortunately, while I wish Amazon the best, as long as there is no standard this hurts everyone. We would rather have a simple interoperability API that would in effect be a "tide that lifts all boats", even Amazon. Thanks again. --Randy On 5/9/09 11:47 AM, "Alexis Richardson" <alexis.richardson@gmail.com> wrote:
Hi all,
Thanks for a thought-provoking week of emails on the OCCI-WG list. Especially thanks to Sam, Richard, Ben and Tim for laying out a lot of the issues.
One link that I found useful was this: http://www.tbray.org/ongoing/When/200x/2009/03/16/Sun-Cloud where we find the following statement:
--- if Cloud technology is going to take off, there¹ll have to be a competitive ecosystem; so that when you bet on a service provider, if the relationship doesn¹t work out there¹s a way to take your business to another provider with relatively little operational pain. Put another way: no lock-in. ... I got all excited about this back in January at that Cloud Interop session. Anant Jhingran, an IBM VIP, spoke up and said ³Customers don¹t want interoperability, they want integration.² ... ³Bzzzzzzzzzt! Wrong!² I thought. But then I realized he was only half wrong; anyone going down this road needs integration and interoperability.
-- Randy Bias, VP Technology Strategy, GoGrid randyb@gogrid.com, (415) 939-8507 [mobile] BLOG: http://neotactics.com/blog, TWITTER: twitter.com/randybias