Who owns the meta-data?
Posted by Andrew Wayman on February 10th, 2009
While the vast majority of folks are still debating what is or is not “cloud computing”, “The Cloud Computing Interoperability Forum (CCIF) is currently discussing cloud portability specifications. By addressing the potential pitfalls associated with portability across cloud implements now rather than later, they are hoping that there won’t be as many problems when it does finally become an issue.
As Alistair Croll points out ( in this interview) though, the question of who owns meta-data may prevent this from becoming reality. Like the popularity of a picture on Flickr, the ownership of application network infrastructure meta-data (the security and delivery policies) is highly in question.
After all, the ability to deliver your application faster and more securely may be part of the “secret sauce” of a cloud computing provider’s offering, and one of its differentiating features. If one cloud computing provider is able to accelerate the delivery of your application 20% but another can only provide 10% and performance is an essential criterion in your decision making process, then it is not advantageous for the cloud computing provider to enable the sharing of those delivery policies with other providers.
So if the application delivery network is such an integral piece of a cloud computing provider’s infrastructure, it seems unlikely they’ll be willing to share the relevant meta-data with other cloud computing providers, driving complete interoperability and portability efforts to concentrate simply on application infrastructure. It is unlikely that Joyent, for example, would willingly hand out the BIG-IP policies it relies on to handle billions of transactions a month to another cloud provider
As Alistair pointed out, the real question right now is who owns the meta-data (because you can only port what you own)? If the answer is the cloud computing provider, then even attempting to formulate such an interoperability specification that bridges application delivery infrastructure implementations seems as though it would be a wasted effort.
-Andrew Wayman
Cloud Computing: Web-Based Applications That Change the Way You Work and Collaborate Online
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