The Console Blog

Posted by Winston Bumpus
Director of Standards Architecture, VMware

I’m Winston Bumpus, director of standards architecture at VMware and president of the Distributed Management Task Force Inc. (DMTF). I want to share some thoughts on the ever-evolving cloud computing environment, specifically around open standards and open source software.

You might have seen an announcement this week on OpenStack, and I wanted to take this opportunity to shed light on VMware’s opinion on the value of open source and the need to view it differently from interoperability. OpenStack, an initiative between NASA and Rackspace, a VMware service provider partner, seeks to accomplish some interesting standards work similar to other open source cloud projects like Nebula, offering customers another choice in cloud platforms.

We love providing customers choice of hardware, operating systems, management platforms and cloud computing platforms. We expect to see all sorts of cloud computing implementations that will provide customers a range of price points, features, benefits and specs based on their requirements.

But what’s most important to us as it relates to these various implementations – those that currently exist and those that are still to come – is that the interfaces work together so that true choice is possible.

When we look at cloud computing, we approach it from a customer-centric point-of-view. We’re in a new era of computing and we see three key issues with Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) cloud computing that currently concern customers:

• Interoperability (common APIs)
• Portability (standard packaging and deployment formats)
• Security (standards-based security infrastructure)

We’re working on all three of these issues through:

• Our support of the Open Virtualization Format, which is currently the key cloud standard for interoperability
• Our participation in cloud standards development within the DMTF and working with other industry leaders including AMD, CA, Cisco, Citrix, EMC, Fujitsu, HP, Hitachi, IBM, Intel, Microsoft, Oracle, Novell, Rackspace, RedHat, Savvis, and SunGard.
• Our work with the Cloud Security Alliance to develop cloud security best practices based on existing standards and technology.

Additionally, we don’t confuse open standards with open source. Open source is a collaborative development process for creating an implementation of a product or service while open standards are developed by a collaborative process to ensure interoperability among various competing product offerings.

We’re huge supporters of open source software efforts, having placed major bets on Spring and RabbitMQ, among others. And while open source makes sense for some product offerings, open standards provide interoperability between open sourced, shared sourced, and private sourced implementations. 

We believe that customers should be able to choose the best products at the best prices and have the flexibility to migrate to a better solution if and when it becomes available. That’s why open standards are critical for both open sourced and other sourced implementations.

We partner with numerous companies, some of which are developing open source cloud computing environments, and we expect those partnerships to continue to grow. But when it comes to interoperability, we encourage customers to judge technologies on performance, not how they were developed.