For years already we’ve heard people moan about cloud lock in, and how things should be portable between clouds. Today, most of the major cloud management platforms and stacks support multiple cloud technologies (some very good ones are even open source) and folks like CloudSwitch and BitNami can wrap your images so they can be deployed where you need them. But the word we keep hearing is portability.
Last week the portability buzz was about VMware’s Cloud Foundry – which is a great step in the right direction and looks like it has the potential to have a real impact in the market. Today there is portability buzz about the “solution pack” for PHP launched by RightScale in partnership with Zend. Add these two recent additions to the growing list of ‘portability’ focused offerings, and I see a positive trend forming.
A year ago the roar from vendors was “use our cloud technology” — now I can see a clear movement headed towards “use any cloud technology”, and open code bases and API’s are starting to become part of these solutions. In order to make the “use any” real, the messaging has also moved up the stack from pure infrastructure to where many of us have been saying it should have been for the past 3 years – applications. Some good news is that there are finally enough people with their eyes on actual standards for cloud portability that in another 3 years we might have something to work with. 
My prediction is that just like late 2009/early 2010 when almost every tech vendor cloudwashed their product messaging, 2011 will be the year that those same vendors start to portabilitywash their offerings. If you want to future-proof your portability, demand open API’s, open standards and ideally (at least for the pieces of code that connect ‘other’ clouds) – open source.
Do you agree or disagree with me? Would love to hear it in the comments.
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Notice: This article was originally posted at http://www.CloudNod.com by Scott Sanchez and is his personal opinion. Copyright 2011 Scott Sanchez, All Rights Reserved.