Everyone seems to be talking about cloud computing, but few people seem to know what it is. That's what InformationWeek's Nick Hoover discovered at Interop this week, at least according to his report Vendors Still Confused With Cloud Computing Definitions. Even vendors like IBM, HP, and SAP -- who should know what it is -- seemed unsure. What would clear up the confusion? One thing would be standards.

One approach to standards for cloud computing is what Andrzej Goscinski, a professor at Deakin University is compiling. He is working on a framework for building infrastructures that are more accessible, reliable, efficient, and yes, understandable. Goscinski's approach builds on his earlier work involving a Resources Via Web Instances (RVWI) framework, which bundles state information of a web service into its WSDL. Goscinski and Michael Brock describe RVWI in their paper State Aware WSDL: The Resources Via Web Instances Framework.

Then there are the folks at NIST, the "National Institute of Standards and Technology," who ought to know a thing or two about defining standards. Computer scientists at NIST, in collaboration with industry and government, are producing a special publication that covers cloud architectures, economics, security, and deployment strategies. To get thing started, they've put together a working definition of cloud computing:

Cloud computing is a pay-per-use model for enabling available, convenient, on-demand network access to a shared pool of configurable computing resources (e.g., networks, servers, storage, applications, services) that can be rapidly provisioned and released with minimal management effort or service provider interaction. This cloud model promotes availability and is comprised of five key characteristics, three delivery models, and four deployment models.

These aren't the only candidates, however. There's the Open Cloud Consortium with its proposals, and the Distributed Management Task Force with its. And that's just for starters.

So don't get in a hurry. It won't be long before we have plenty of cloud computing standards. And that's when things will get really confusing.

-- Jonathan Erickson
jerickson@ddj.com