Cloud computing

The DSP0263 specification describes the model and protocol for management interactions between a cloud Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) Provider and the Consumers of an IaaS service. The basic resources of IaaS (machines, storage, and networks) are modeled with the goal of providing Consumer management access to an implementation of IaaS and facilitating portability between cloud implementations that support the specification. This document specifies a Representational State Transfer (REST)-style protocol using HTTP. However, the underlying model is not specific to HTTP, and it is possible to map it to other protocols as well.  

CIMI addresses the management of the life cycle of an infrastructure provided by a Provider. CIMI does not extend beyond infrastructure management to the control of the applications and services that the Consumer chooses to run on the infrastructure provided as a service by the Provider. Although CIMI may be to some extent applicable to other cloud service models, such as Platform as a Service (PaaS) or Storage as a Service ("SaaS"), these uses are outside the design goals of CIMI.

The Practical Guide to Hybrid Cloud Computing was written to help enterprise information technology (IT) managers, business decision makers, application architects and application developers understand the hybrid cloud computing deployment model and how it can be used to solve business challenges rapidly and cost effectively.
 
Hybrid cloud enables cloud service customers to leverage the wide ranging capabilities of public cloud service providers while using private cloud deployment for more sensitive applications and data.
 
This guide details strategic and tactical activities for decision makers - covering all the essential technical considerations for hybrid cloud deployment including integration, connectivity, governance, management, security and privacy.

The Impact of Cloud Computing on Healthcare was written to help enterprise information technology (IT) and business decision makers of the healthcare industry as they analyze and consider the implications of cloud computing on their business.
 
This guide contains guidance and strategies to help decision makers evaluate and compare cloud computing offerings from different providers, taking into account requirements from various actors including medical practices, hospitals, research facilities, insurance companies and governments. The paper covers current market dynamics, challenges and benefits of cloud computing on healthcare IT.
 
Throughout the paper, the role that management and IT standards play to improve the flexibility, interoperability and portability of cloud computing environments is highlighted.
 
Topics covered in detail:

• Key factors influencing cloud computing adoption in the healthcare industry, the barriers to address, and considerations for service and deployment models
• Specific IT trends in the healthcare industry that are addressed most effectively, both technically and economically, by cloud computing as opposed to traditional IT environments
• Cloud computing services for healthcare currently available that provide substantial benefits to healthcare organizations and patients
• The planning process for migrating healthcare IT systems and applications to the cloud
• Recommendations for how best to achieve the benefits of cloud computing while maintaining an acceptable level of risk

The mission of the Distributed Tracing is to define standards for interoperability between tracing tools.
Modern cloud-native applications are highly distributed and often span multiple technology and vendor boundaries. The complexity of these applications requires a detailed understanding of how individual requests are executed. This is referred to as "tracing".
Tracing tools for collecting this information have been available for quite some time. However, these tools have not been built with interoperability in mind. This leaves the developer with a number of challenges in getting an end-to-end trace of complex transactions:

• Traces are often broken, because trace context information is lost in a contributing tier or the trace is restarted
• Vendors cannot pass proprietary information across tiers instrumented with a different implementation and therefore lose relevant information (e.g. step count, server information, ...)
• End users don't have the ability to create complete end-to-end traces of application transactions which are monitored by different tools, as there is no defined data format and semantics for trace data

The scope of this working group is the definition of data formats and headers enabling the propagation and correlation of tracing data across different implementations.

The TOSCA Simple Profile in YAML specifies a rendering of TOSCA which aims to provide a more accessible syntax as well as a more concise and incremental expressiveness of the TOSCA DSL in order to minimize the learning curve and speed the adoption of the use of TOSCA to portably describe cloud applications.
 
This proposal describes a YAML rendering for TOSCA. YAML is a human friendly data serialization standard (http://yaml.org/) with a syntax much easier to read and edit than XML. As there are a number of DSLs encoded in YAML, a YAML encoding of the TOSCA DSL makes TOSCA more accessible by these communities.
 
This proposal prescribes an isomorphic rendering in YAML of a subset of the TOSCA v1.0 XML specification ensuring that TOSCA semantics are preserved and can be transformed from XML to YAML or from YAML to XML. Additionally, in order to streamline the expression of TOSCA semantics, the YAML rendering is sought to be more concise and compact through the use of the YAML syntax.

Cloud computing can become more valuable if the semi-automatic creation and management of application layer services can be ported across alternative cloud implementation environments so that the services remain interoperable. This core TOSCA specification provides a language to describe service components and their relationships using a service topology, and it provides for describing the management procedures that create or modify services using orchestration processes. The combination of topology and orchestration in a Service Template describes what is needed to be preserved across deployments in different environments to enable interoperable deployment of cloud services and their management throughout the complete lifecycle (e.g. scaling, patching, monitoring, etc.) when the applications are ported over alternative cloud environments.

The OASIS TOSCA TC works to enhance the portability of cloud applications and services across their entire lifecycle. TOSCA will enable the interoperable description of application and infrastructure cloud services, the relationships between parts of the service, and the operational behavior of these services (e.g., deploy, patch, shutdown)--independent of the supplier creating the service, and any particular cloud provider or hosting technology. TOSCA will also make it possible for higher-level operational behavior to be associated with cloud infrastructure management.
 
By increasing service and application portability in a vendor-neutral ecosystem, TOSCA will enable:

• Portable deployment to any compliant cloud
• Smoother migration of existing applications to the cloud
• Flexible bursting (consumer choice)
• Dynamic, multi-cloud provider applications

Human experts in specific IT infrastructure and business domains possess substantial knowledge about prevention, remediation, and optimization of systems. However, there is a significant challenge in capturing, combining, and leveraging this siloed knowledge across domains.
 
SAF is a catalog-based XML collaborative knowledge framework that is designed to address these challenges by automating appropriate responses to changing business conditions and integrating contributions from diverse domains to provide competitive advantage. SAF has applicability in IT and business including cloud computing, service management, governance, security, energy, eGov, financial, emergency management, healthcare, and communications.
 
Cloud computing, in particular, exacerbates the separation between consumer-based business requirements and provider-supplied IT responses. SAF facilitates knowledge sharing across these domains, allowing consumer and provider to work cooperatively together to ensure adequate capacity, maximize quality of service, and reduce cost. The SAF technical committee considers cloud computing to be an area where the value of existing and developing standards could be significantly enhanced using SAF.
 
For more information on SAF, see the TC Charter, the FAQ, and the (working) Symptoms Automation Framework Documents.

The Security TWG provides architectures and frameworks for the establishment of information security capabilities within the storage networking industry, including that of stored information in heterogeneous environments. The focus of the Security Work Group is directed toward long-term security solutions, taking into account any security inherent in underlying transports or technologies.

The SSM TWG is a technical work group of the SNIA Technical Committee defining the Swordfish specification that extends the Distributed Management Task Force (DMTF)'s Redfish specification (API) to handle the emanagement of storage equipment and storage services found in modern data centers.

The target market for this interface is Cloud and Web-based IT professionals for scalable storage management and related data services. Within this community, the focus is on usability by non-computing science degree personnel. The interface should be simple to use, accessible, and compatible with the existing tool chains and with modern transports.

The primary focus of the I/O Traces, Tools, and Analysis (IOTTA) TWG is to create a worldwide repository for storage-related I/O trace collection and analysis tools, application workloads, I/O traces, and best practices around such topics. That repository is located at http://iotta.snia.org

The I/O traces of interest to the IOTTA TWG include those up at the host (e.g., system call, file system), those involving a file server (e.g., NFS, CIFS) and those at the "transport level" (e.g., SCSI, Fibre Channel). I/O traces of application workloads along with the analysis and definition of common, recommended semantics and formats for I/O traces are also specific areas of focus for the TWG. Standardized I/O trace formats/semantics will enable the development and use of common I/O trace collection and analysis tools as well as facilitate the sharing of the I/O traces themselves.

The IOTTA TWG is for those interested in the use of empirical data/metrics to better understand the actual operation and performance characteristics of storage I/O, especially as they pertain to application workloads. This includes not only storage vendors but also storage users as well as those within the academic community who are performing research related to storage I/O and storage devices.

The Cloud Storage TWG acts as the primary technical entity for the SNIA to identify, develop, and coordinate systems standards for Cloud Storage. This group aims to produce a comprehensive set of specifications and drives consistency of interface standards and messages across the various Cloud Storage related efforts. The TWG also documents system-level requirements and shares these with other Cloud Storage standards organizations under the guidance of the SNIA Technical Council and in cooperation with the SNIA Strategic Alliances Committee.