The Open Cloud Standards Incubator, a new group formed under the auspices of the Distributed Management Task Force (DMTF), plans to extend existing standards like OVF for the cloud.
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The 12 members of the group, which include VMware Inc., Citrix Systems Inc., Microsoft and Red Hat Inc., have a mandate to enhance the Open Virtualization Format (OVF) for cloud computing, to deliver cloud computing management application programming interfaces (APIs) and to address cloud security.
Specifically, the group hopes to add extensions to the existing OVF standard that would define the necessary security and quality-of-service characteristics of an OVF package running in the cloud. A common cloud management API would enable users to query cloud providers for information about availability, performance and usage. Finally, the group will tackle security in federated cloud environments.
Winston Bumpus, the president of DMTF, said that organizing the group as an "incubator" should help speed the process of developing these standards, which might otherwise be waylaid by nondisclosure agreements between members. "Incubators allow people to work together quickly and create drafts as input to the standards organization," Bumpus said. "My hope is that within 12 months, all these deliverables will be completed," he said.
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