16-20 september träffades ISO/IEC JTC 1/SC 38, Cloud computing and distributed platforms, hos SIS i Stockholm, och under torsdagen så anordnades ett lunchmöte där ordförande och experter kring molntjänster presenterade arbetet inom gruppen.

Efter mötet så ställdes frågan till ordförande, Steve Holbrook, om varför man gör denna typ av aktivitet och värdet med molntjänststandarder, nedan är hans svar.

The purpose of having the meeting/presentation and the value/the why of having cloud computing standards.

Our committee, JTC 1/SC 38 - Cloud Computing and Distributed Platforms, is in Stockholm this week for our semi-annual plenary meeting. We’re busy progressing our international cloud computing standards projects further down the JTC 1 standards-development track. The committee is composed of volunteers from 29 countries, and Sweden is one of the most active. This is the 3rd time Sweden has hosted SC 38 meetings! We’re very appreciative of how supportive they are to our cause.

Therefore we were delighted when Swedish Standards Institute (SiS), asked if we’d be interested in holding an outreach event while we're in town. They were thinking they could invite some local IT professionals and consultants to meet with us so the locals could learn more about what we’re doing and why it’s important. I and the other SC 38 leaders were very happy to support this meeting--so much so that we stepped out of our meetings to do so. We were pleased with the audience and the good questions they raised in the Q&A session. The outreach meeting was very much worth it for us, and I hope it was worth it for those who attended.

As to the value, and the “why” of having cloud computing standards, I’d say, in a nutshell, it’s because of how important cloud computing is in the IT industry. Following along, because of this interest in cloud computing itself, there is also interest in standards dealing with it.

Cloud computing is an enabling technology. Things like artificial intelligence, big data, and edge computing (processing of data) near IoT devices, have all become possible because of the flexibility of cloud computing, and the new approaches to distributed processing that cloud computing brings. So many new vistas on the technical horizon have become visible because of the new heights to which cloud computing has lifted us.

Cloud computing itself is built upon over 60 years worth of innovation and experience in the field of distributed processing. Predecessor distributed computing efforts like OSI, with its Seven Layer Model, Distributed Computing Environment (DCE), CORBA, Web Services and SOA, all have combined to get us where we are.

The raft of hardware innovations in networking, storage, memory and processor, coupled with burgeoning efforts around cloud computing in Open Source have all played a factor in this tsunami of innovation around cloud computing, and therefore in making cloud computing as successful and impactful as it has been.

There are thousands of Open Source Software (OSS) projects in the cloud computing ecosystem. Docker containers, and Kubernetes container clustering and management systems are two great examples. They truly represent an example of "distributed platforms" that is part of our committee name. These projects, along with several others in the cloud computing OSS ecosystem, are revolutionizing the DevOps world. The very nature of how teams of developers are organized to accomplish their jobs has been affected by Docker and Kubernetes. Innovative new directions like serverless computing, micro-services, and cloud native computing, have all been forged in the furnace of OSS.

As a result, cloud computing is becoming increasingly more powerful. It’s also getting easier to use, easier to develop in, and easier to manage.

We're super excited about these new capabilities emerging from the OSS cloud computing ecosystem. We are interested in forging pathways to standardization for anything that could benefit from standardization--things like interfaces that need to behave the same, no matter which cloud infrastructure/platform provider your cloud service is deployed on.

Because cloud computing is a worldwide phenomenon, and because regulatory and procurement guidelines written by policy developers, governments or large enterprises need to be written in a way that demonstrates understanding of cloud computing concepts, terminology and a grasp of how the cloud computing ecosystem actually works in order for these guidelines to be more impactful. The World Trade Organization has stipulated that there should be no technical barriers to trade across all its member states. International standards can help to remove such barriers, as well as to prevent them from happening in the first place.

We'll be busy for a while paving a foundation of International Standards for cloud computing and distributed platforms that will help support even further innovation in this leading edge space.