"Best practices for Cloud Storefronts" NCOIC Session Sept 21 Virginia

[Bob Marcus]

At the July 15 NDU Cloud Computing Symposium, Vivek Kundra (Federal CIO) strongly endorsed the creation of a government Cloud Storefront. This Storefront (run by GSA) will make Cloud resources (IaaS, PaaS, SaaS) available to government agencies.  Centralized access points for procuring Cloud resources are being considered by several other governments including the United Kingdom G-Cloud app store  and the Japanese Kasumigaseki Cloud . 

There are strong initial efficiency benefits (reduced procurement time and costs) gained by providing government projects with controlled access to multiple Cloud resources. However unless a set of best practices are followed, there could be negative long-range results such as lack of portability and interoperability across Cloud deployments. On September 21, the Network Centric Operations Industry Consortium (NCOIC) will host an open free Session on "Best Practices for Cloud Storefronts" at its Virginia Plenary.  The focus will be on recommended minimal standardizations (and compliance tests) for Cloud resources that are included in Storefront. Government IT leaders (e.g. GSA) will be invited to participate in the Session.

Some examples of possible standardization areas are listed below.  The Cloud Standards Coordination  (cloud-standards.org) groups and CloudStandards mailing list could provide valuable feedback on the status and value of recommended Cloud Storefront standardizations. It would be valuable to collect recommendations before the Session and prepare a summarized presentation that could be an extended keynote talk (possibly with multiple speakers). Let me know your feedback on the Session topic and agenda. Thanks.

 

Bob Marcus

robert...@gmail.com

 

Possible standardizations for Cloud resources available through Storefronts and future Cloud Brokers include:

* Security (e.g. authentication, authorization)
* Interfaces to IaaS (e.g., compute, storage)
* PaaS & deployment model formats for Cloud applications
        - Resource descriptions (Required, Available)
        - Service & SLA models
* Management Frameworks
        - Governance and Policy Enforcement
        - Regulatory agreements (e.g. Data location and security)
        - SLA formats (e.g. Performance, Availability)
* Portable component descriptions (e.g. VM’s)
* Data exchange formats (to and from Clouds)
* Cloud Taxonomies and Reference Models