Page 876 - Cloud computing: From paradigm to operation

5 Intercloud and interoperability

Ideally, cloud subscribers would like to be able to select any cloud provider based on the basis of service cost,
performance and capabilities. In order to make this feasible for the cloud consumer, the various hypervisor
platforms and infrastructure components involved will need to be interoperable and enable portability,
leveraging defined industry standards.

Reliability and reproducibility of a change such as a VM migration involved in IaaS are based on pre-defined
standards, specifications, frameworks, scenarios, and processes. This need exists in their organizations too
for reasons such as being able to demonstrate the ability to move between internal private clouds, being able
to move between cloud providers if necessary, and if for no other reason, to demonstrate that the service is
not locked in to that environment with no relocation options once it has been established there.

5.3 Platform capabilities type interoperability testing
Platform capabilities type (PaaS) interoperability encourages seamless operation of cloud applications across
providers, rapid integration with consumer orchestration engines, and automatable configuration and
operation of both the PaaS container and the execution of the application itself. This provides the combined
benefits of rapid application deployment and linear scalability without the overhead of directly managing the
underlying infrastructure for the application, all while avoiding PaaS lock-in.
The business drivers for PaaS Interoperability are as follows:
• Rapid application deployment: Enable subscribers to quickly deploy new business applications.
Reduce the overhead of ongoing application deployments.
• Application scalability: Ability to quickly scale applications up and back based on the real-time
demand for those applications.
• Application migration: Ability to move applications from one discrete PaaS to another PaaS available
from the same or different cloud provider with minimal effort.
• Business continuity: Migrate or replicate applications among PaaS services to address outages,
security breaches, or other disruptions. This is intended to encompass both disaster recovery and
disaster avoidance.

Interoperability perspectives follow:
• Interconnectability: The parallel process in which two coexisting environments communicate and
interact.
• Portability: The serial process of moving a system from one cloud environment to another.

5.4 Application capabilities type interoperability testing
In portability and interoperability of application capabilities (SaaS) environments, business process
functionality offered through SaaS solutions can be initially connected, transferred, or interconnected. SaaS
interoperability allows organizations to create mash-ups from multiple SaaS and non-SaaS applications. This
is an issue that primarily concerns data exchange, which includes metadata, and interface compatibility.

6 Cloud computing interoperability testing between CSC and CSP
CSC is a party in a business relationship for the purpose of using cloud services. The interoperability between
CSC and CSP supports the CSC to interact with CSP according to a prescribed method and obtain predictable
results. Enabled by interworking between CSC and CSP, CSC can use the capabilities provided by CSP, such as
using the processing, network and storage capability. For example, CSC can use virtual machine provide by
the CSP.
CSC can also perform business administration tasks such as subscribing to cloud service and administering
use of cloud service through the interaction with CSP.

868