The much-discussed, allegedly secretly developed and very rumor-stirring document called “Open Cloud Manifesto" that was signed by numerous vendors to back the cloud-computing interoperability was released today after several days of intense debate over it.   

 

The document called “Open Cloud Manifesto" has six pages and is based on six principles. The first principle requires that cloud vendors "ensure that the challenges to cloud adoption (security, integration, portability, interoperability, governance/management, metering/monitoring) are addressed through open standards." Other principles refer to the fact that vendors:

- should not use their market position to “lock customers into their particular platforms;

- should use existing standards whenever possible;

- must be careful about creating or modifying standards;

- must focus on customer needs versus "the technical needs of cloud vendors;"

- should peacefully collaborate with cloud-computing groups, communities and projects. 

 

Of the numerous vendors involved in the “Open Cloud Manifesto," Google signed up only to back out later, Amazon said it is not interested while Microsoft criticized the plan. 

 

"We had concerns about process and governance that led us to question IBM's intentions," Microsoft's Steve Martin said according to BBC News. Amazon already launched its Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) service, while Microsoft also recently launched the Azure cloud platform.

 

While Microsoft denounced the “Open Cloud Manifesto" as being flawed and developed in secret, Amazon said it will review it just as it does with other ideas on standards and practices, a company spokesman said according to PC World. 

 

The other vendors involved are IBM, Sun Microsystems, VMware, Cisco, EMC, SAP, Advanced Micro Devices, Elastra, Akamai, Novell, Rackspace, RightScale, GoGrid and several others.