standards

Overheard: Future of clouds remain hazy without standards

It is clear that without standards of one kind or another (de-facto or from a recognised body), there won’t be a market, and without a market, the cloud is unlikely to thrive. The competition isn’t as much between cloud providers, as it is between cloud providers and internal IT organizations. Cloud providers need to keep that firmly in mind. Benjamin Ellis, CloudCamp London 2: On Standards. Special Guest Post

A standard image format might provide a base level of standardization, but there is a risk that the industry then gets caught up in a ‘lowest common denominator’ model that throttles much of the unique innovation that the scale and speed of cloud computing allows. There was a consensus for a pragmatic approach: a layering of APIs, standardizing a layer at a time.

(My apologies to Benjamin Ellis! I had originally credited this quote to James Govenor.)

Overheard: The nice thing about standards

The nice thing about standards is that there are so many of them to choose from. Andrew S. Tanenbaum

Andrew Tanenbaum is best known as the author of Minix, an open source OS with a user interface that’s similar to Unix. Tanenbaum created Minix as an educational tool — he’s a professor at the Vrije Universiteit in Amsterdam. The best known academic use of Minix was when Linus Torvalds used the Minix platform as inspiration for a new operating system, which he called Linux.