Microsoft and cloud interoperability
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The cloud is everywhere – literally, but also in the mainstream press as well as the IT press these days. We all use it with no real concern for the technology going on in the background though I’d argue that will come under the spotlight more and more over the next few years. Consumers will become more aware as the inevitable outages and security breaches happen and businesses are already interested due to something we call interoperability in the IT sphere. The word is thankfully quite self explanatory (but bloody hard to spell) – it’s concerned with how systems or devices “talk” to each other in the IT world. You don’t actually care whether your phone talks HTTPS and passes XML to a Windows Server or a Linux Server when you’re getting your email but in the process, you’re likely using a number of protocols that without interoperability would make your phone seem like it was talking Swahili to a mail system that talked English.
Microsoft’s Craig Shank and Jean Paoli published a post on this topic today talking about the work of Microsoft and the industry to make cloud systems place nice together through interoperability. They included a very un-Microsoft infographic that I really like. We should do more of these things to make IT a little more appealing than the usual PowerPoint slide or IT architecture diagram.
Interop (the short version of the word you should you to show you’re in the know) is going to be fundamental to the success of the cloud. As Craig says
There’s a tremendous level of creative energy around cloud services right now — and the industry is exploring new ideas and scenarios together all the time. Our goal is to preserve that flexibility through an open approach to cloud interoperability.”
Jean Paoli adds that working with open source technologies like PHP and Java will be key to Microsoft’s cloud success. Yes, you read that right – working with open source really is pretty important as if we think the cloud is going to be this all Microsoft thing we’re living in cloud cuckoo land. To be fair to my colleagues in Redmond, this approach is patently obvious if you look at services like Windows Azure that positively welcome PHP, Java, Ruby, Apache, Tomcat and MySQL. You couldn’t have said that a few years back about Microsoft…but now, we’re arguably more open that some of our competitors who you’d expect to be leading the openness.
We’re continuing to push for more openness and added a new work stream to our Interoperability Executive Customer (IEC) Council of of 35 chief technology officers and chief information officers from organizations around the world. It’s not just about our forums of course and we participate in the industry fora such as the Open Cloud Standards Incubator – all the other players you’d expect are in here – IBM, RedHat, Cisco, VMWare, HP etc.
The cloud is the future and hopefully it’ll usher in an era of never seen before interop and openness that takes away the hassles of making systems talk to each other for end users and makes all our toys and tech play nice together. I know that sounds quite utopian for those of us who have been around for a while but personally I’m optimistic and like the idea of competing on merit rather than competing with gate after gate.