Cloud Computing Use Case whitepaper final draft

[drus...@ca.ibm.com]

The first stage of the journey is just about complete. The work effort
started on June 1st and the final draft has been posted on July 31st
( right on target). What makes this initiative unique is that the
whitepaper has come together using an open community approach. And
even more interesting, feedback to the posting of the final draft is
meeting with questions, what is next. Clearly this approach to the
development of this whitepaper has been successful.

Looking at the conclusions / recommendations, one reads:

Cloud computing builds on and complements many trends in the industry,
including virtualization, SOA and Web 2.0. As a result, standards
already exist for many of the requirements outlined in this paper. As
we go forward, we will work together as a community to specify the
existing standards that meet customer needs, leverage standards work
already in progress, and identify what is needed to fill in the gaps
not addressed by existing standards.

This paper was created by an open Web community of more than 750
participants. The initial group consisted of supporters from the Open
Cloud Manifesto, but it quickly grew to include many other individuals
around the world. The community included representatives from large
and small companies, government agencies, consultants and vendors.

As the paper was developed, three principles from the manifesto were
crucial: 1) users should work together, 2) activities to keep the
cloud open should be customer driven and 3) existing standards should
be used wherever possible. This paper is validation that those
principles work, and they will be central to any follow-on work.

The use cases described here demonstrate the following general
requirements:

- Common VM Formats, Data Formats and APIs: Virtual machines,
data and applications created for one cloud provider should run on
another cloud provider without changes.

- Cloud Management: Cloud computing is not feasible without
service management, governance, metering, monitoring, federated
identity, SLAs and benchmarks, data and application federation,
deployment, and lifecycle management. These requirements are defined
in Section 3.

- Security: Security in cloud computing is vital, although
the requirements for security will vary widely depending on the
application and data types.

- Location awareness: A way of identifying the location of
the physical machine hosting the cloud infrastructure is an absolute
requirement for many government regulations.

It must be possible for consumers to implement any of the use cases
outlined here without resorting to closed, proprietary solutions that
lead to vendor lock-in. Where existing standards meet requirements, we
must ensure those standards are implemented pervasively and correctly.
Where existing standards do not meet requirements, we must define and
implement the standards needed to meet them. This community-written
paper is meant to be the reference for establishing a truly open cloud
computing environment.

The complete Cloud Computing Use Case whitepaper can be found at :
http://bit.ly/IRWN9


All comments for the paper can be viewed at:
http://groups.google.com/group/cloud-computing-use-cases?hl=en