Mike D’s Blog

Recently, Fujitsu submitted their cloud API to the DMTF for consideration in the standards process. The news caught my eye a long time ago and I read up on the effort a long time ago but just never got around to blogging about it. Well, here I am with time to blog so let me give you a quick run down of what’s going on and then link you to a great post by William Vanbenepe for more detailed information.

VMware had submitted our vCloud API to the DMTF a while back. This was an effort to get the conversation and process started on creating a standardized cloud API for all to use. We don’t expect that ours will be the end result of this process. We really just did the submission to spark the discussion (although we also think ours is a good start). Fujitsu was the first to follow with a submission although there are others out there with an API (Amazon, Rackspace, Google, SUN, etc). Hopefully the others will submit their thoughts and participate in this process.

So what is this Fujitsu API? It’s actually less of an API and more of a definition of interconnects. I mean there are no functions per-se. Nothing to program against. It’s really interesting to see what they wrote up. I think if you combine their submission with the VMware submission you get some overlap in definitions but they really do provide a good synergy.

Anyhow, I just thought I’d make everyone aware of what’s going on. This will be a long process and we probably won’t see the first draft until the end of 2010 at the earliest. If you happen to work for or work with one of the other companies that has an API out there then encourage them to work with this process so we can get something the ISV ecosystem can really get behind. I’ve said it once and will say it 1,000 times – standards is the only way this cloud thing is going to work and stick around.

Read more on the details of the Fujitsu API at William’s blog.

As I stated on Tuesday, I was speaking on a cloud panel at a TMForum event last week. It was a really great event. One of the things that TMForum announced the day that I was down there was the Enterprise Cloud Buyers Council. It’s a really interesting group that combines leading Enterprises in the cloud space with leading Service Providers/Telcos in the cloud space to figure out what Enterprises really need from a cloud. This is something that nearly everyone I’ve talked to in the cloud vendor world has struggled to truly understand. Sure there are some base requirements out there:

• Fast provisioning


• Security


• Support for enterprise apps and operating systems


• Etc

To date though people have pretty much taken a “build it and they will come” approach. While that’s fine it’s really hard to get to the commodity type of pricing that consumers want when you have to put out a lot of CapEx in order to stand up capacity on services you hope the market will consume. It’s much easier for the business to have a set of requirements to operate against. It’s the aim of this new council to work on those requirements.

Just looking through the press release on the first vendors to sign up I see a lot of familiar names:

• Alcatel-Lucent


• Amdocs


• AT&T


• BT


• CA


• Cisco


• EMC


• HP


• IBM


• Microsoft


• Nokia Siemens Networks


• Telecom Italia


• Telstra


• Deutsche Bank


• Commonwealth Bank of Australia

I’ve been working with pretty much everyone on that list to build up their cloud service so I know for a fact that all are advanced enough in cloud that we should get a good list of requirements from this group. More will be coming into the fold soon from the enterprise side to join the two enterprises already on the list.

What’s even better is this organization is also working with the DMTF. The DMTF seems to be the one common group that all of the standards orgs and bodies are working with. They already have a formal relationship with CSA (the Cloud Security Alliance) and an informal one with OCCI (the Open Cloud Computing Initiative).

Make sure you follow this org closely and sign your own organization up to help with the effort if you’re getting into cloud. Of course I’d really like to see more enterprises in this group than vendors in order to get good material out. Right now it’s too heavy on the vendor side of the house.

Here’s a list of things they are currently working on to keep your eyes on:

• Common Cloud Services Product Definitions


• Cloud Security Issues


• Cloud-to-Cloud Interoperability, Data Portability and APIs


• Service Provider Benchmarking


• Buyer-demand Forecasting


• Federated Cloud Stores


• Cloud Service Level Agreement Process Management


• Cloud Network Performance and Latency Issues

I’d be interested to hear other’s thoughts on this new buying council and the impact to the industry.

I’m sure you’ve all seen this by now but just in case – this one is hillarious.

I’ve had a lot of people ping me lately asking where the heck I’ve been. My last post was back in July and wasn’t very cloudy then either. The truth of the matter is I’ve been working completely on cloud. The market has taken off and everyone wants to launch something ASAP and thankfully VMware has been the centerpiece for every single cloud out there (except Microsoft, Google, and Amazon).

I was recently just at an all day cloud track at TMForum where most of the major telcos, service providers, and enterprise cloud players from around the world had all gathered together. It was interesting to sit there and listen to every single one get up and talk about what they were doing with VMware to launch their cloud. So many exciting things that I really wish I could blog about but NDAs and a complete lack of time have prevented me from doing so.

So here we are at the end of the year and some people are going into change control freeze so I’m starting to get a little more time to catch up and sleep. 7 months with only 4-5 hours sleep each night can really drain you. So what do I do with this new found time? Well, for one I’m going to start blogging about all of the great stuff that’s happening in cloud from the eyes of someone that’s been out there launching customers. For another thing I’m working with our strategic partners out there to develop our joint cloud story so I’ll write about what we’re doing there. The main point is that I need to write and get all of these thoughts out of my head and onto paper.

My first set of topics is going to be all about the vCloud API – what it is, how to use it, etc. I’ve been the main guy behind a real-world implementation of the vCloud API so people can actually consume it. I’m also writing the self-paced lab for the vCloud API and the VI Java API at VMware Partner Exchange 2010. This will help me get some of those ideas out and talked about before they go into the lab.

Well, that’s it. I just wanted to let everyone know that I am around and kicking. A lot of hard work later and some 190,000 air miles and this market is really moving forward. So look for more posts from me very soon. Until then…