The OCCIware Challenge: the lack of unified and overarching cloud computing standard

The use of computing resources as on-demand services, also called cloud computing, is now a reality in most of computing domains. 

Nevertheless, cloud computing users are still confronted to major barriers: 

• Heterogeneity of cloud computing offering
• Interoperability between cloud interfaces
• Integration to build multi-cloud systems
• Portability of applications and cloud computing users activities.

The cloud computing paradigm has not yet been implemented as a formal comprehensive framework neither as standardized technologies. Migrating an existing software to a service or developing a new one still requires an important R&D effort for a software editor. 

Cloud computing has been partitioned into three big service kinds as defined by NIST (National Institute of Standards and Technology) :

• The delivery of infrastructures (virtual machines, online storage, etc.) also called IaaS for Infrastructure as a Service,
• The delivery of execution environment (Python, Java, Ruby, etc.) also called PaaS for Platform as a Service,
• User applications (groupware, mailing services, etc.) called Software as a Service, or SaaS.

Today existing cloud standards are linked to a particular domain : infrastructure (IaaS), platform (PaaS) or application (SaaS). So far, the OCCI emerging standard was only used for managing IaaS resources but the associated resource oriented meta-model made it the best possible candidate for developing the required toolchain for managing every kind of resources as a service.

OCCIware aims at developing cloud computing specific scientific and technical tools that will considerably lower the cloud market entry cost for existing software actors as well as the development of new innovative services with great added-value, thanks to the departitioning of cloud computing technologies.