Why the Future of Cloud is Open

Done right, a cloud delivers strategic advantages to the business by redirecting resources from lights-on to innovation. But only an open cloud delivers on the full strategic business value and promise of cloud computing.

But not all "open" is created equal. Openness doesn't stop and end with the submission of some format to a standards body or with the announcement of partners endorsing some specific technology platform. Using open source technologies to build the cloud is (or should be) a given. It's more than that.

An open cloud isn't about having some singular feature or characteristic. It's about having a wide range of attributes that push the needle from wholly closed to truly open. Just because a cloud avoids being a walled garden in some respects doesn't mean that it delivers the full business value of an open cloud.

Open Cloud – Closed Cloud

Source: Red Hat

An open cloud has the following key characteristics:

• Is open source. This allows adopters to control their particular implementation and doesn't restrict them to the technology and business roadmap of a specific vendor. It puts users in control of their own destiny and provides them with visibility into the technology on which they're basing their business. Open source also lets them collaborate with other communities and companies to help drive innovation in the areas that are important to them.
• Has a viable, independent community. Open source isn't just about the code, its license, and how it can be used and extended. At least as important is the community associated with the code and how it's governed. Realizing the collaborative potential of open source and the innovation it can deliver to everyone means having the structures and organization in place to tap it fully.
• Is based on open standards, or protocols and formats that are moving toward standardization, that are independent of their implementation. Cloud computing is still a relatively nascent technology. As such, standardization in the sense of "official" standards blessed by standards bodies is still in early days. That said, approaches to interoperability that aren't under the control of individual vendors and that aren't tied to specific platforms offer important flexibility. This allows the API specification to evolve beyond implementation constraints and creates the opportunity for communities and organizations to develop variants that meet their individual technical and commercial requirements.
• Gives you the freedom to use IP. Recent history has repeatedly shown that there are few guarantees when a company owns IP on which you depend. Even if using some piece of proprietary IP is, today, tacitly tolerated, there are no guarantees for tomorrow in the event of a change of ownership or financial situation. The only guarantee is to use technology that is free from any required or potentially required licenses or other restrictions. so-called "de facto standards," which are often "standards" only insofar as they are promoted by a large vendor, often fail this test.
• Is deployable on the infrastructure of your choice. Hybrid cloud management should provide an additional layer of abstraction above virtualization, physical servers, storage, networking, and public cloud providers. This implies – indeed requires – that cloud management not be tied to a specific virtualization and other foundational technology. This is a fundamental reason that cloud is different from virtualization management and is a fundamental enabler of hybrid clouds that span physical servers, multiple virtualization platforms, and a wide range of public cloud providers, including top public clouds.
• Is pluggable and extensible with an open API. This lets users add features, providers, and technologies from a variety of vendors or other sources. Critically, the API itself cannot be under the control of a specific vendor or tied to a specific implementation, but must be under the auspices of a third-party organization that allows for contributions and extensions in an open and transparent manner. Deltacloud, an API that abstracts the differences between clouds, provides a good example. It is under the auspices of the Apache Software Foundation and is neither a Red Hat-controlled project nor tied to a particular implementation of cloud management.
• Enables portability to other clouds. Implicit in a cloud approach that provides support for heterogeneous infrastructure is that investments made in developing for an open cloud must be portable to other such clouds. Portability takes a variety of forms, including programming languages and frameworks, data, and the applications themselves. If you develop an application for one cloud, you shouldn't need to rewrite it in a different language or use different APIs to move it somewhere else. Furthermore, a consistent runtime environment across clouds ensures that retesting and re-qualification isn't needed every time you want to redeploy.

Only by embracing clouds that are open across the full gamut of characteristics can organizations ensure that their cloud delivers the full strategic value promised by cloud computing. An open cloud isn't a nice-to-have for IT organizations. It's a must-have.

Learn more on how to build a cloud for your organization using an open, hybrid strategy at www.redhat.com/cloud/build/ and get the latest on cloud trends each month by subscribing to Red Hat Cloud News.