Standardized Cloud Computing APIs – Driving the Adoption of Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS)

In 2009 - even with all the attention, focus and hype surrounding cloud computing – widespread adoption of Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) still appears to be several years away. The current mode of adoption is largely built around “do it yourself” approaches. This means selecting a service provider and migrating applications and data to the new infrastructure.

The chosen service provider may have a set of tools to ease the migration or even offer paid services to assist. There are also consulting businesses to provide help with everything from strategy to implementation. Importantly, there is a rapidly growing set of software vendors with tools to streamline and automate the migration.

The software vendors in particular continue to innovate and provide breakthrough approaches to reducing the complexity and cost of adopting cloud-based IaaS. There are integration and management tools along with many variations of system, OS and application virtualization that help make applications ever more agnostic to the underlying infrastructure. There are even tools that capture all of detailed infrastructure dependencies - including compute, storage, network – so the functional equivalent of each can be reproduced in the new IaaS environment.

In many cases, these tools are quite helpful and powerful. However, there are costs. There are of course the purchase or licensing costs of these software tools. But there are often greater costs in terms of the need for new expertise and direct labor. Fortunately the benefits of IaaS often outweigh these costs and a growing number of organizations are adopting IaaS.

Yet to achieve widespread adoption of IaaS, the cloud computing ecosystem will need to evolve further. One key element of this evolution will be a more standardized application programming interface (API) that works similarly with different IaaS solutions across a range of cloud service providers. Ultimately this will enable the cost efficient integration of a wide range of software applications with IaaS environments.

Over time, this means that applications will be cloud-ready, out of the box. Instead of just having generalized installation processes that simply support a wide range of enterprise IT environments, these processes will be further extended to support cloud-based installation across different IaaS implementations. Of course it won’t end at the installation process. The applications themselves will be extended to leverage the unique capabilities of cloud services, whether scalability, redundancy or elasticity. This will apply to complex, multi-tier, server-based applications as well as to desktop applications.

A standardized API for IaaS will enable the integration required to cloud-enable a huge variety of applications. The availability of these applications – without the additional costs of migrating or retrofitting them to IaaS – will drive much broader adoption of IaaS. In fact, the IaaS environment will be further abstracted and hidden in this manner.

One new development in cloud APIs is the public beta of the open source Cloud Servers® API from Rackspace (www.rackspace.com). Another important API development comes from libcloud (http://libcloud.org/), a standard client library for many popular cloud providers, written in python. Neovise expects the further development, acceptance and use of APIs such as these to have a major positive impact on the adoption of IaaS by enabling out of the box integration between applications and IaaS.