Mapping of Cloud Standards to the Taxonomy of Interoperability in IaaS

The idea behind cloud computing is to deliver Infrastructure-, Platform- and Software-as-a-Service (IaaS, PaaS and SaaS) over the Internet on an easy pay-per-use business model. However, current offerings from cloud providers are based on proprietary technologies. As a consequence, consumers run into a risk of a vendor lock-in with little flexibility in moving their services to other providers. This can hinder the advancement of cloud computing to small- and medium-sized enterprises. To address these issues, standardization efforts have to take place in order to support further developments in the clouds. Standardized exchange mechanisms and interfaces are crucial in order to facilitate interoperability. In this paper, we look at several cloud standards, such as Open Virtualization Format, Open Cloud Computing Interface, and Cloud Data Management Interface, and analyze them against a taxonomy in order to point out their role for interoperability in IaaS. The taxonomy presents important IaaS topics, such as access mechanism, virtual appliance, security, and service-level agreement.