Many people in the industry believe it is critically important for the Cloud to be open and share concerns about the private nature of the leading Cloud platforms. In fact, there are already a few projects focused on the goal of a truly open source Cloud with mass adoption.
However the present Cloud offers have followed this trend and are largely private. No one benefits from a fractured landscape of closed and incompatible Clouds where migration is difficult to do and true Cloud transparency is impossible.
Nowadays the solution to interoperate between Clouds is using Web Services. For example, Amazon EC2 has a web service interface to manage his own virtual-machines, VMware has a vCloud interface and other products have their own web services interface. But the problem is that these interfaces are private and based on their own Clouds Computing. Eucalyptus Systems considers API AWS (Amazon Web Services) the default standard for the industry because of its popularity. Eucalyptus Cloud is an open-source virtualization middleware but it uses an Amazon EC2 interface. On the other hand, OpenNebula propose an open source interface called OCCI very easy to use and to extend. OCCI was originally initiated by UCM (Complutense University of Madrid) and now the Open Cloud Computing interface comprises a set of open community-lead specifications delivered through the Open Grid Forum.
Usually the APIs wars have been a crucial strategic plan to control the technology platforms and their associated markets. I don’t know if δ-cloud or OCCI will be an API reference of the next years. But I have a clear idea. An open standard API should emerge. Now both have very good fundamentals and are present in many discussion forums. In conclusion we chose to use API OCCI.
We would like to highlight that our OCCI API is used in a lot of research and production projects as , OpenNebula, EMOTIVE, OpenStack, Fed-Cloud, MeghaCloud
I believe that the next step is creating another standard working group that sits on top of them all.
A Cloud Admin