Cloud computing

The Practical Guide to Cloud Service Agreements was written to help enterprise information technology (IT) and business decision makers analyze cloud service agreements (CSAs) from different cloud service providers.
 
CSAs are written to set clear expectations for service between the cloud customer (buyer) and the cloud provider (seller), but should also exist between a customer and other cloud entities, such as the cloud carrier, the cloud broker and even the cloud auditor. This guide focuses primarily on the CSA details between the cloud customer and cloud provider.
 
The “Guide for Evaluating Cloud Service Agreements” section is the heart of the paper. It provides a prescriptive series of steps that cloud customers should take to evaluate CSAs in order to compare multiple cloud providers or to negotiate terms with a selected provider

Interoperability and Portability for Cloud Computing: A Guide was written to provide a clear definition of interoperability and portability and how these concepts relate to various aspects of cloud computing and to cloud services.
 
The aim of this guide is to give both cloud service customers and cloud service providers guidance in the provision and selection of cloud services indicating how interoperability and portability affect the cost, security, and risk involved.
 
Version 2.0 is updated to reflect the ISO/IEC 19941 Cloud Computing Interoperability and Portability standard and its facet models of interoperability, data portability, and application portability. Containers and their associated technologies are addressed in the paper, as well as automation in the use of cloud services.

Convergence of Social, Mobile and Cloud: 7 Steps to Ensure Success is a practical reference to help enterprise information technology (IT) and business decision makers analyze and consider the implications of social, mobile and cloud technologies on their business. Organizations increasingly value how these technologies can improve customer engagement, forge new partnerships and drive competitive advantage and seek to understand the impact on new and existing business processes.
 
This guide contains guidance and strategies to help decision makers evaluate and compare offerings in key areas from different providers. Along with the base technologies of social, mobile and cloud, the guide discusses the importance of supporting technologies like integration, Big Data analytics and DevOps that enhance the business value of convergence. Industry-specific use cases are used to highlight business impact.

Convergence of Social, Mobile and Cloud: 7 Steps to Ensure Success is a practical reference to help enterprise information technology (IT) and business decision makers analyze and consider the implications of social, mobile and cloud technologies on their business. Organizations increasingly value how these technologies can improve customer engagement, forge new partnerships and drive competitive advantage and seek to understand the impact on new and existing business processes.
 
This guide contains guidance and strategies to help decision makers evaluate and compare offerings in key areas from different providers. Along with the base technologies of social, mobile and cloud, the guide discusses the importance of supporting technologies like integration, Big Data analytics and DevOps that enhance the business value of convergence. Industry-specific use cases are used to highlight business impact.

This document defines the artifacts and APIs that need to be offered by a Platform as a Service (PaaS) cloud to manage the building, running, administration, monitoring and patching of applications in the cloud. Its purpose is to enable interoperability among self-service interfaces to PaaS clouds by defining artifacts and formats that can be used with any conforming cloud and enable independent vendors to create tools and services that interact with any conforming cloud using the defined interfaces. Cloud vendors can use these interfaces to develop new PaaS offerings that will interact with independently developed tools and components.

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.

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 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 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.

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 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

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.