What IaaS Standardizations are needed for Cloud Store Fronts?

[Bob Marcus]

The US government recently issued an RFQ  for IaaS resources to be made available through the GSA Cloud Storefront. The RFQ specifies detailed performance requirements and SLAs. An expanded GSA Presentation gives an aggressive schedule for future RFQs (PaaS, SaaS) and deployments (Slide 11). However there are no requirements in the RFQ supporting the "Creation of a services based environment that is is interoperable and standards-based." (Slide 10 ). To help achieve this goal, there will be a Session on "Best Practices for Cloud Initiatives using Storefronts"  for September 21 at the NCOIC  Plenary in Fairfax, Va. The focus will be on minimal standardization requirements for IaaS Storefront resources to enable interoperability and portability.

To make the Session more productive, it will be valuable to collect and circulate a set of preliminary standardization recommendations before September 21.  Due to the planned  rapid deployment of the Storefront, the recommendations should be implementable by IaaS providers within the next 6-12 months. Some possible areas for standardization include:

* Interfaces to Cloud Resources supporting portability of PaaS tools and SaaS applications
* Interfaces to Cloud Resources supporting interoperability across Clouds
* Sharing and/or movement of virtual computational resources across Clouds 
* Data sharing and movement across Clouds
* Authentication and authorization across Clouds

Any feedback on potential IaaS standards for future Storefront resources will be valuable. Thanks.