Description
More and more consumers are expressing concerns about the lack of control, interoperability and portability. Why? Because they are central to avoiding vendor lock-in, whether at the technical, service delivery or business level, thus ensuring broader choice. As a user, open standard interfaces protect you from vendor lock-in, so you avoid significant migration costs you would face when open interfaces are not provided.
For a European research provider interoperability means more efficient resource utilisation. The EGI federated cloud is prime example of this. Through a decade of peer collaborative work in Europe and beyond, the experts behind FedCloud have gained considerable expertise in standards development and implementation, laying the foundation for interoperability testing and fairer competition. This expertise is now also supporting interoperability between Europe and Brazil through EUBrazil Cloud Connect.
The Cloud Interoperability Plugfest project, Cloud Plugfests, is an international co-operative community series designed to promote interoperability efforts on cloud-based software, frameworks, and standards among vendors, products, projects and implementations. The series supports ongoing and continuing interoperability efforts among and between the sponsoring organisations, and with the cloud community at large. These efforts include organised software demonstrations, in-person developer gatherings, and continuous access to professional-grade cloud testing frameworks and tools.
The Plugfest will see Brazilian participation for the very first time. EUBrazil Cloud Connect will test the OCCI implementation of fogbow, middleware that has been developed by the Federal University of Campina Grande. This new connecting bridge with Brazil focuses on a new implementation of OCCI API (fOCCI) as well as an extension to accommodate requests for resources exploited in an opportunistic way. This workshop is also an opportunity to showcase growing international interest in interoperability testing and why the Plugfest is important to certify compliance of the implementation with the specification.
Reducing ambiguity through standards profiling
A Standard very often supports multiple use cases in its specification text which can lead to ambiguity and a lack of real interoperability across different interfaces. Ambiguity is a fundamental challenge for interoperability standards and key to maximising interoperability. A profile on a standard clarifies in an unambiguous way how a standard has to be interpreted, explaining how to implement it based on your specific use case.
As a starting point for this, CloudWATCH has created a portfolio of European and international use cases on technical, policy and legal requirements. The common standards profiles derived from these use cases will be tested around the federation of cloud services.
This challenging work is part of CloudWATCHs mission to making an active contribution to standards and certification, driving interoperability as critical to boosting innovation in Europe.
CloudWATCH use case portfolio - insights from standards groups
The workshop will take a brief look at the standardisation landscape today. It will identify some of the most important requirements that existing standards can meet. Interactive discussions will then explore possible pathways to filling gaps, either through new standards or extensions to existing standards. The workshop will wrap up with an overview of the benefits of interoperability and how it is set to become a hot topic around best practices in the business community in 2015.
Organisers: Fraunhofer FOKUS and EGI.eu
