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Microsoft, Amazon Oppose Cloud Computing Interoperability Plan
thefickler writes "Microsoft is opposing an industry plan, the Open Cloud Manifesto, to promote cloud computing interoperability. Officially, Microsoft says the plan is unnecessarily secretive and that cloud computing is still in an early stage of development,
but there are allegations that Microsoft feels threatened by the plan because it could boost Linux-based systems. The goal of the group behind the manifesto, the Cloud Computing Interoperability Forum (CCIF), is to minimize the barriers between different technologies used in cloud computing. And this is where the problem seems to lie, with the group stating that 'whenever possible the CCIF will emphasize the use of open, patent-free and/or vendor-neutral technical solutions.' Some speculate that Microsoft is actually worried that this will allow open source systems, such as Linux, to flourish, at the expense of Microsoft technology."
Amazon is also declining to support the plan, saying, "the best way to illustrate openness and customer flexibility is by what you actually provide and deliver for them." Reader smack.addict contributes a link to an O'Reilly piece asking what openness really means for cloud computing.
Microsoft... complains about something because it is too secretive? wasn't this in the book of revelations somewhere?
Obama is a twitter sock puppet
Openness implies lower barriers to entry. If they control the technology, they control the admission price. If you want to play on our 'cloud' then it's going to cost a CAL.
Sig this!
Serves them right. With all their "standards".
In the computer world, whenever there are a few entrenched players, the opposing companies often join together to try to counter their power, and they often do it in the name of interoperability and standards. So while in this case it looks like Amazon and Microsoft are the bad guys (let's be honest, Microsoft is always the bad guy), in reality it is just a matter of their competition trying to get a piece of the action. Who are the supporters of the CCIF?
IBM
SUN
CloudCamp
Zero Nines
and some others.
Similar to when Facebook started becoming the dominant social networking site, a few of the others got together to try to make a public API so it is easy for users to switch between sites. Typical corporate politics.
Qxe4
Maybe it really is too early to focus on standardization. It often freezes the standard quo and makes it harder to implement new stuff, c. f. the x86 and Windows requirements for backwards compatibility. I also don't really see where the problems are (others might have more experience there): EC2 uses standard Xen instances that should be somewhat portable. The only non-portable part is the meta-level configuration.
Fleur de Sel
One can be for interoperability without having to be against proprietary solutions. The latter is a political choice of that group's, not a technology one. They're basically saying eff you MS, we really don't want your kind in our little group, so it's no wonder MS and Amazon et al. oppose it.
Attention zealots and haters: 00100 00100
I mean that's exactly what you said about the iphone 3 months ago, that it needed to be open since closed systems are things of the past....
Queue expected sarcastic eye roll.
You are who you are, let no one tell you different. But, never close your mind to a new point of view.
> "Microsoft is opposing an industry plan, the Open Cloud Manifesto..."
And in the traditional effort to cover butts, B. Gates, in attendance at Davos, participated in celebrating OC startups that are working to bring OC to fruition. As one attendee stated "You have to be open to having your data shared..." - and we know this automatically rules out MS, so until or unless MS doesn't see Google-backed OC as a threat, we can expect statements against it from MS proper to surface in the press.
So, the scribd.com from the TFA lists tags for the Open Cloud Manifesto as "Open, communist, cloud"? And the top related document is "The Communist Manifesto"? And Microsoft is still complaining, "We were admittedly disappointed by the lack of openness in the development of the Cloud Manifesto"? What do they have to do? Put Fidel's picture on the cover?
End anonymous moderation and posting on
Everything else is FUD based on speculation.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
From the summary:
Some speculate that Microsoft is actually worried that this will allow open source systems, such as Linux, to flourish, at the expense of Microsoft technology
So in other words, the "Microsoft is opposing such a Wonderful Thing (tm)" is all speculation?
I support the MSFU project, which standards for Machine Standard Full Usability... but can also be read in another way more pertinent to Microsoft ;P
Open Standards never work
So how did you manage to post that?
Is let me import my damn VMWare image. That or get VMWare to suck down their images. Then I could run an instance of my machines locally. Really, aren't all these things basically nothing more than fancy ISO files?
But maybe you and I are both thinking too low level. "High level" would be dealing with what is *on* the virtual machines, not the images themselves. Then you are talking things like IP configuration, where crap is on the disk, etc...
Or maybe I'm just full of it. But I was surprised that nobody has offered a way to suck these things into VMWare Workstation.
Nobody knows the cloud models that will work. Each customer's needs are different at this point. I'm not surprised that any cloud provider is willing to conform to any standards at this point. Give it a few years, the free market will begin to identify what to standardize on.
You don't have to maintain infrastructure to deal with your peak loads. You just have to keep enough to handle the baseline and than when you get hammered, you "turn on" more "computers" as you go. In theory, those "computers" could be located anywhere, so if you are mentioned on some UK news show and get hammered over there, you can "turn on" more of your "computers" to handle the load and turn them off when you are done.
In other words, basically, you have an infinite amount of computers which start almost instantly that you pay by the hour/minute for. Each of them boots off a standard image you control and all of the service providers have ways to script things like "hey, I've just been booted! lets tell the load balancer to add me to the pool!"
In yet other words, it is basically like a distributed virtual server. Take a single image and on-demand, load up as many virtual servers as you need.
Here are two excellent use cases:
It is 9/11 and slashdot was hammered. I am too lazy to cite, but they were shoving extra computers into the rack to keep the thing online (slashdot was pretty much the only place that wasn't hammered). With cloud computing, they'd just fire up as many extra servers as the load needs and turn them all off when they are done.
Dailykos. Election night. Rather than buying a shit-ton more hardware to handle such peak loads, they'd just fire up as many extra "computers" as they need and pay for like 24 hours of use.
Your Blog. Slashdot, Digg, Fark and New York Times link to your article about Captain Kirk. Too much traffic? Nonsense... fire up a pool of servers in the cloud and turn them off when you are done!
What Open Source means for cloud computing is customers will get more hosting options than they otherwise would. Microsoft's plan is to sell you access to both hardware and software, but Open Source software would open the hosting end of the equation to greater competition between hosting companies, allowing customers to choose between hosting companies in a manner similar to how they can today choose web hosts.
"In prison you just have to shut your eyes and take it. Here you have to shut your eyes and give it."
I was hoping that last link in the submission was to someone playing microsoft's side, to see why they are against it - why would want it that way, but it was just more highlighting the pluses of open source and the minuses of closed. So much of the open source noise we here is extremely one-sided. Is anyone able to link to or post up devil'd advocate on closed source cloud? There's got to be some advantages to it, and we need both sides represented here to compare them. (anyone that simply says "closed source is best. always", immediately loses my confidence)
I work for the Department of Redundancy Department.
This is the standard story of the Standards War.
(This is mostly stolen off of Ed Felten; I think from the famous talk he was at first threated to not give, but I'm not sure my memory isn't playing tricks on me).
The standard story goes as follows:
Clearly if the large players form a monopoly or oligopoly, it's detrimental to the economy; see your favorite Econ 101 textbook for why they're bad in theory, or look at your ISP or telephony provider to see why they're bad in practice.
The interesting question is whether regulation of such markets is beneficial. In principle I'm in favor of government intervention if and only if there's a good case to be made that such intervention is a net benefit; preferably such a case would be supported both by economic theory and empiric evidence.
I don't know what either economic theory or past empiric evidence offers in terms of tests for whether government intervention is useful.
Also, this is my precious intarnets. I want the gubbermint to keep its greasy paws offa it, except to prevent debit card fraud so I can buy stuff on-line and not worry about losing my money. I especially don't trust the US government (based on what I hear on /.) to intervene in a competent way; I should probably read more newz.dk (~= "slashdot.dk") to see whether I should distrust my own gubbermint as much.
But, to all those who have to deal with this cloud thing: sorry there'll still be incompatibility. An insincere "Yay!" for individual rationality.
I think Microsoft is trolling. In this specific troll posting they are exploiting the fact that people don't realize that an open standard process does not necessarily result in an open standard. The reality is probably that the manifesto group is not willing to get subverted by them ('subvertible' is MS's definition of 'open').
Their mode of action seems to be: first try to subvert a standards process to introduce proprietary technology into it, thus giving itself an advantage; if that fails, call the process "not open enough". Proceed to form a new "more open" standards process stacked with Microsoft partners that competes with the existing one.
Those who would give up liberty to obtain working drivers, deserve neither liberty nor working drivers.
If all you could do is turn them on, the whole thing would be pointless and you might as well go back to owning your own infrastructure. The cost savings comes from being able to pay only for what you use, no more, no less.
I'm guessing that the translation is: "We expect to make a lot of money with internet applications. We'll make more if we can create confusion so that smaller competitors won't be able to enter the field."
And:
"We don't care about our country. We don't care about what is good for the people around us. We only care about making money. If we can make more money being abusive, that's what we'll do."
The 'Open Cloud Manifesto' will launch on Monday in New York. Itâ(TM)s a joint project that includes IBM, Amazon and Google among many others and aims to produce guidelines for how different operating systems should interact in cloud computing. Thatâ(TM)s a name given to services which run online rather than on a userâ(TM)s computer: think Gmail vs Microsoft Outlook for an idea.
And the CNet article does not imply a rejection by Amazon, it states:
"Like other ideas on standards and practices, we'll review this one," Amazon said in a statement. "Ideas on openness and standards have been talked about for years in Web services. And we do believe standards will continue to evolve in the cloud-computing space.
In summary - "they had a party, and I wasn't invited!" bawls well-known local playground bully Microsoft.
First, the "cloud" doesn't run on anything. The "cloud" is basically a metaphor for an virtually infinite amount of servers you can fire up running your system image at once. It doesn't mean your instances are "floating" around a pool of servers--those images are running on real servers in some dudes rack and each running instance is indeed mapped to one server. If the physical server your instance is running on dies, oh well, you just fire up your image somewhere else. If you looked in the data center, you'd just see a bunch of regular servers running something like VMWare ESX (or whatever) and a bunch of fancy scripts to load and provision customer's images across the data center. You'd probably also see some serious SAN shit too.
All your instances typically connect to the same pool of shared, perminate storage. Each instance (at least on EC2) gets a couple hundred gigs of temporary disk space that goes away when you shut down that instance.
With Amazons EC2 (the only one I've played with), you can shove anything into your disk images has long as it is x64 or x86. "Anything" could be Windows Server, Linux, Sun, FreeBSD, whatever. You can download a lot of pre-build images from the community too--like "here is FreeBSD /w useful stuff already installed".
The trick right now is everybody has different ways to fire up said images. And once they are fired up, the API's your software must interact with are different. One guys way of provisioning an IP address or mounting a disk is different than another.
But this is to be expected. The whole industry is far to young to ask for standards.
One article linked to says Amazon is an author of the manifesto. (http://www.itworld.com/windows/65198/cloud-computing-linux-has-microsoft-blogging)
Another article says Amazon is against it (http://news.cnet.com/8301-13860_3-10206077-56.html), but doesn't link to a reference.
I suppose both could be true, but then I would expect to know why Amazon changed their mind.
Think Deeply.
For starters, you will not run your HIPAA compliant health care system or your damn investment bank datacenter using some random shmucks pool of servers. That is silly. Privacy issues aside, both systems probably have very predictable loads and wouldn't benefit from cloud computing.
Second, even if you did, you'll probably be able to specify which data centers your virtual machines will run. After all, they want to charge you more for running stuff overseas!
Third, you aren't the market. Startups and web companies with spikey traffic are. If you have a predictable amount of traffic, odds are good this kind of provisioning would cost more. But if you are prone to unpredictable spikes, or you just don't want to deal with maintaining your own equipment, this is probably a good deal.
Lastly, just because RMS says something is evil, doesn't mean he is right. I'll just leave it at that. I know you didn't specify the keyword "RMS", but rest assured that there are a lot of "haters" who have never even heard of the term before that windbag piped up. Now they hate it without even knowing what it means (kinda like how RMS hates it without understanding it).
This statement makes no sense. You take advantage of it by *not* using it. That is the point. You only pay for what you use and no more. Prior to cloud computing (okay, the term is kinda silly), you'd have to provision for your peak load. Now you just provision for your baseline and fire up a potentially infinite pool of servers during peak loads.
Who is CCIF and why should we care?
Why are so many distributions still maintaining their own compile farms? Why not just fire up a pool of servers on EC2 and use http://distcc.samba.org/ to build all the RMS/YUM's/Packages/Whatever? Why not just fire up a bunch of extra web servers in the cloud when you push out a new release of your distribution? It is probably way cheaper than getting donated hardware and hosting.
Hell if all you haters were smart, you'd be pressuring the FSF to have its own "cloud" that GPL users could tap into as a compiler/testing farm. Your open source project could just fire up a server that is running your testing image and use it to create binaries or run automated tests.
Who is the guy who proposed it, and who cares?
Cloud computing is a farce, and a waste of resources.
I ploped the author's name into google and frankly, after you see all the buzzwords, he has the most to gain.
fuck the cloud, fuck stupid "standards" and "plans" which really have no purpose.
Plus, what about people who want to keep things separate?
I sure as hell dont want some of my files on thsi "cloud" among other things.
the rest will tend towards open source, as that is what always happens to the also rans.
see:
Eclipse
Mysql
MegaCorps want to lock you into their crap so they have to do as little work as possible, take as much of your money as they can, giving you as little of what you want as possible. IOW they don't give a rats ass how easy anything is for you or what you want. Film at 2300.
Is that why the Kindle has DRM? Openness is it?
So in other words, the "Microsoft is opposing such a Wonderful Thing (tm)" is all speculation?
Yes you might justifiably call that FUD but In view of past experience with Microsoft, I'd say this sort of speculation is a lot more likely to turn out to be true than if we were dealing with any other randomly selected evil mega-corp. Micosoft is sitting on a hugely profitable dominant market share in a number of areas. If they lose a significant proportion of that market share they will find it significantly harder to regain that market share than it was to lose it. I'd say it's a safe bet that executives@microsoft.com spend a lot of time these days being paranoid about repeating past mistakes like when they slept through the search engine revolution and suddenly woke up to find that Google had mushroomed into a dangerous rival in a key market segment almost over night. To add insult to injury Google had actually achieved a dominant market share in that very important market segment and has proven frustratingly capable of defending it.
Only to idiots, are orders laws.
-- Henning von Tresckow
From someone that is following this closely from within the "cloud services community", has read every article, every relevant blog, twitter, forum, and newsgroup post, I hope I can bring some enlightenment to this issue.
The CCIF is an organization that is supposed to be little more than an "open forum" between those in the cloud services community. I'm not certain if its role should even be to make such statements or issue documents, but if it is, that those statements should be discussed and agreed upon by its members. This manifesto appears to have been created secretly by the founders of the CCIF without discussion, review, or disclosure directly in contrast to the goals and promises of the CCIF. Instead, that review and disclosure only happened behind closed doors with "large companies" such as Microsoft and IBM. As I made it quite clear on the CCIF newsgroup, regardless of the origin of the document, it is of my opinion that the CCIF as an organization should not endorse any documents without a vote by its members.
So far, it seems the plan is that the CCIF will officially release this document on Monday, prior to the meeting it will hold on Thursday in NYC. I hope that those behind the scenes here realize that the best course of action is to wait until Thursday and secure a vote by members present at that time.
Moving system images around isn't that tough to do, but moving the context of that image and it's data are still challenges that lead to differences between the VM providers. If it were as simple as "provide an image", then there wouldn't be much of a market for the cloud computing providers to compete over.
This is a young industry. It's far too early to try to standardize on stacks beyond those being provided by the players in the cloud industry. Sure one could pick a stack of best-of-breed FOSS solutions for the raw technology, but that's not going to address the real interoperability costs of getting the raw data closer to the users without losing integrity.
I do not fail; I succeed at finding out what does not work.
You can tell an idea is still being formulated, when the people using it can not even define it.
Open the "open manifesto" and read the definition of cloud computing then explain to your self what cloud computing is. Whatever it is is just as old as its architecture and since artictectures change it may be obsolete before its even fully defined.
I would say Microsoft has little to worry about, at least at this stage.
Ok, I'll bite.
I don't see anywhere listed DirectX to be a standard in any ISO, ANSI or IEEE docs. DirectX is where it is because the Microsoft push.
Flash isn't listed in any ISO, ANSI or IEEE docs. Flash is where it shouldn't be on the first place. Flash is a plague upon humanity. Thank god for flashblock. Flash is where it is because some early idiots thought it would be cool to make dynamic pages using flash.
Windows isn't listed in any ISO, ANSI or IEEE docs. Windows is where it is because of shady business practices by a company named Microsoft (see case for DirectX). Windows is a plague upon humanity. Thank god for Linux. (see the case for flash).
Now, if you excuse me, I'll hit the submit button whilst blocking flash. I have to go play my video games in my Linux box, which happen to use OpenGL to render graphics. Oh, and yeah, there are some great games for linux too, I had to categorize my games submenu on GNOME to fit them all.
No? Then I say, Hey-Hey, You-You, get offa my cloud!
See Reuven's post. Certainly the CCIF leadership was involved, but to my knowledge, It was led by IBM, who doesn't want to be named so they don't make it look like an "IBM initiative". See this CNet article for more information on how IBM approached Microsoft.
IBM completely fumbled the ball here, they were disorganized and got their PR organization to call people up 1 week ago to sign the document, a fait accompli. You might be able to do that to smaller cloud companies, but you don't fucking do that to Microsoft and expect acquiescence.
See this CNet article for details.
They really fumbled the ball on organizing this, expecting Microsoft to acquiesce with one week's notice.
I say, let's go without a standard a bit longer; ~2 years. Clouds are too new. I don't want someone deciding what the standards are until we have more disruptive innovations. Until then, build a wrapper (or create an open source one) around the API of your current cloud provider.
I was curious if this is the direction we are going to see in cloud-computing: Open Clouds versus Closed, Proprietary Clouds. I read an article a few days ago which got into how Sun and IBM could hurt Microsoft's Azure offering even before it got any traction: http://cloudstoragestrategy.com/2009/03/sun-ibm-open-clouds-ahead.html GiMP, I'd be happy to hear more from you on this!
Well, I'm sure hoping that it's because it's late and I could really do with some shuteye but I can't figure out what the heck that means. Does it mean anything besides ``We, Amazon, will do cool things that make it easier for us to sell you something''? That illustrates openness? Personally -- thanks to Amazon's One-Click patent -- I take it to mean that Amazon doesn't want anything like openly available, patent-free software to be something that they may have to adopt. Lord knows that they couldn't survive without their Sooper Sekret, patented, proprietary software running their business. Now I'm sure I'm being too hard on poor ol' Amazon so can anyone please translate Amazon's business babble to something resembling English so I and everyone else can understand?
Oh, and I really loved this from the Cnet article:
My guess is that Martin has only recently joined Microsoft and has not done enough reading about the company's recent track record in participating in standards bodies. Either that or Martin is just spouting another variant of "Our shit don't stink."
CUR ALLOC 20195.....5804M
I'm sorry, I finally saw it. Curse my old failing eyes!
The parent post is rated "-1, Troll" because of the subject and first sentence.
However, I think the rest of the post is pretty insightful, if unfortunate. To me, they are very uncomfortable and inconvenient truths, especially when we're trying to advocate open source and open standards.
I think TIMING of entry to MARKET is the key. First movers get a lot of advantage, as long as the product has high usability, high availability, and most importantly, low pricing.
Yeah, I know, Newton and XO-1. But Eee also.
That may all be true, for certain providers. But it is not true for "cloud computing" as a concept. Cloud computing is about using the network to make the most of available hardware.
It can be implemented on the scale of just a few dozen computers in a single site. LTSP is an example of this. DistCC is an example. Open/Mosix is an example. Hell even VMWare is an example.
It can also be implemented on the scale of a single global corporation. And there are many advantages to this. Lots of people are already (willingly) using "low-resource hardware" to access the net, because it is mobile and convenient. Giving them access to all of their data so that they can work while on-the-go is a huge advantage. When implemented on this scale, there is no loss of privacy, no anti-piracy interests involved, and FOSS only benefits because only open-standards based software is flexible enough to offer these type of solutions on this scale.
Ultimately, though "cloud computing" is not a "scheme". It is a computing paradigm grounded in the economic principle of making the most of available resources. The limited resources of computing (energy, processing-time, storage, bandwidth) will ultimately be optimized using flexible software and free-market principles. "Cloud" computing, utility computing, terminals and virtualization are all just slight variations on this theme. You are free to use any and all of them, or none at all, depending on your resources and preferences.
"I assumed blithely that there were no elves out there in the darkness"
Cloud computing, as we generally view it: keeping data offsite and running apps over say a browser. There is nothing worse in my eyes. First, I like to hang on to my data myself, second, I like being able to toy with programs (read: open source & local).
And yet, I develop most of my apps to be website-driven.
This is because I like to have most of my stuff on a central computer under my control. Also, I generally develop my apps so I can in fact host them somewhere else, but very easily retrieve copies of the data. This make them highly accessible and yet circumvents the problems I stated above. I still control the data and I can toy with the program as much as I want.
Microsoft gets wind of the 'Cloud Manifesto' gets hold of the document and preemptively trashes it in public. See here where Microsoft acted to innovate Intel out of the NetPC business.
,-))'
.. Marshall and I told him the only way for us to participate in the release is if: 1) No NC mention in any specification '
,-)
'if we don't dive right in with something, Intel will undoubtedly be happy to dictate terms to us
'They did 2 things that amaze me: a) They kept the NC specification around despite saying they would not. b) They snuck in a server specification
I guess the next move for Microsoft is to join the consortium and sabotage it from the inside
davecb5620@gmail.com
'it is of my opinion that the CCIF as an organization should not endorse any documents without a vote by its members'
"This document is meant to begin the conversation, not define it"
'A few key points of clarification regarding the "Open Cloud Manifesto" Although I had personally being speaking with Microsoft about http://www.elasticvapor.com/">inclusion of some of their requested alterations to the document, we are dealing with several very large companies with numerous points of contact'
So, MS tried and failed to get the document altered and then trashed it in public before it was released.
THE CLOUD COMPUTING INTEROPERABILITY FORUM
davecb5620@gmail.com
If you are worried about privacy and data security, why would you trust any host? Nothing about "cloud computing" makes things any less private or secure. If you don't trust your host running a rack of your leased servers, why would you trust them with anything else?
Either Amazon gets to do it, or more likely, VMWare will do it. VMWare as a vested interest in making sure they can import just about every virtual machine image under the sun.
Was that open source projects could use "cloud computing" to quickly compile packages and test them on every configuration they support. No need to keep a bunch of servers running idle most of the time. Turn on "Freebsd 6.2 i386", compile all the ports as packages, turn it off. Turn on "Freebsd 6.3, x64 SMP", compile them as packages, turn it off. Turn on "Freebsd 7.0 Sparc64", compile, turn off. Repeat for every supported configuration.
No need to purchase and maintain separate build servers running every configuration. Just keep separate images, shove them into the cloud, and cook up some spiffy scripts to turn them on and off when required.
It makes a damn lot of sense too. If you were smart, you could hook it so that every time there was a new commit, a script would fire up a batch of servers and rebuild whatever package was changed.
Yes. People who hate something without understanding what it is they hate.
Steven Martin @ Microsoft writes:
But what about web and cloud-specific standards? Microsoft has enjoyed a long and productive history working with many companies regarding standardization projects; a great example being the WS* work which we continue to help evolve.
You want to talk web standards? I mean, Really?
Let's see:
- IE-specific extensions to HTML since forever
- IE-specific extensions to HTML used by MS-Office exporters (which is actually a big deal when MS-Office controls the market)
- Lack of standards support in IE without any sane reason (remember png alpha transparency?)
It sounds like Microsoft is making headway in the interoperability space, and it sounds like the latest releases of IE are trying to implement standards, but when you've got a history of not only having proprietary, opaque, not-for-release MS-Office binary file formats, but also stacking the ISO voting organizations for OOXML, please understand that people are going to hesitate to trust you.
We expect interoperability and standards efforts to evolve organically as the industry gradually shifts focus to the huge opportunity provided by cloud computing.
Yeah, except Microsoft's traditional version of "develop organically" is usually "use Microsoft standards or get locked out of playing in the sandbox," or do you not remember what's been happening at Redmond for the last decade? Maybe it's not you, but look at the company (no pun intended) you keep.
When the center of gravity is standards and interoperability, we are even more enthusiastic because we believe these are the key to the long term success for the industry, as we are demonstrating through a variety of technologies such as Silverlight, Internet Explorer 8, and the Azure Services Platform.
Do you mean open standards? Because if the standards aren't open, then how do you expect "long term success" for multiple players in the industry?
Taking a look at the services you mentioned, IE8 has improved standards support, which is great, but Sliverlight is a Proprietary system, with most (nearly all?) deployments using patented, non-open-standard codecs. The Azure Platform seems like it's mostly all Microsoft software stack, with some .Net integration for Java and Ruby and several open standards. Maybe those services are a little more open than previous Microsoft offerings, but your platforms don't appear to be anywhere as near as open as offerings from other players like Amazon and Google.
We were admittedly disappointed by the lack of openness in the development of the Cloud Manifesto. What we heard was that there was no desire to discuss, much less implement, enhancements to the document despite the fact that we have learned through direct experience.
I'm somewhat unclear as to how this Cloud Manifesto came into being, so I understand some amount of concern from the Microsoft camp as well. That being said, what enhancements does Microsoft have to offer? Instead of just complaining about this document, why don't you link to some "best practices" documents for all providers and consumers of cloud computing.
It appears to us that one company, or just a few companies, would prefer to control the evolution of cloud computing, as opposed to reaching a consensus across key stakeholders (including cloud users) through an "open" process. An open Manifesto emerging from a closed process is at least mildly ironic.
And what of OOXML? Is Microsoft willing to hand over control of the current and all future versions of OOXML to a standards body completely? Was Microsoft interested in "reaching a consensus across key stakeholders...through an open process" ? I find your comments about open standards "emerging from a closed process...at least mildly ironic."
My comment nearly writes itself:
To ensure that the w
coding is life