[occi-wg] thought on interoperability vs integration

[Randy Bias]

Alexis,


    I found this very enlightening.  I think making the distinction between
interop and integration is very important.  In retrospect, I can now see
that while many here have been talking about integration, I've solely been
focused on interop.  I agree that it is critical to get that piece
functional ASAP and then begin working on the integration components.

    In fact, I'm even more excited now about the prospect of a very small
core that could be adopted rapidly across many providers.  This would go
very far towards encouraging wider adoption much faster, I believe.  GoGrid
has folks approaching us now who are curious about who they should build to
first and for many of them Amazon's APIs are the best bet because they are
the de facto leader.

    Unfortunately, while I wish Amazon the best, as long as there is no
standard this hurts everyone.  We would rather have a simple
interoperability API that would in effect be a "tide that lifts all boats",
even Amazon.

    Thanks again.



--Randy



On 5/9/09 11:47 AM, "Alexis Richardson" <alexis.richardson at gmail.com> wrote:

> Hi all,
> 
> Thanks for a thought-provoking week of emails on the OCCI-WG list.
> Especially thanks to Sam, Richard, Ben and Tim for laying out a lot of
> the issues.
> 
> One link that I found useful was this:
> http://www.tbray.org/ongoing/When/200x/2009/03/16/Sun-Cloud where we
> find the following statement:
> 
> ---
> if Cloud technology is going to take off, there¹ll have to be a
> competitive ecosystem; so that when you bet on a service provider, if
> the relationship doesn¹t work out there¹s a way to take your business
> to another provider with relatively little operational pain. Put
> another way: no lock-in.  ... I got all excited about this back in
> January at that Cloud Interop session. Anant Jhingran, an IBM VIP,
> spoke up and said ³Customers don¹t want interoperability, they want
> integration.² ...  ³Bzzzzzzzzzt! Wrong!² I thought. But then I
> realized he was only half wrong; anyone going down this road needs
> integration and interoperability.

-- 
Randy Bias, VP Technology Strategy, GoGrid
randyb at gogrid.com, (415) 939-8507 [mobile]
BLOG: http://neotactics.com/blog, TWITTER: twitter.com/randybias