Dedicated to the belief that the cloud should be open

open cloud manifesto

interfaces. Organizations will want the flexibility to create new solutions

enabled by data and applications that interoperate with each other regardless of

where they reside (public clouds, private clouds that reside within an

organization’s firewall, traditional IT environments or some combination). Cloud

providers need to support interoperability standards so that organizations can

Without standards, the ability to bring systems back in-house or choose

another cloud provider will be limited by proprietary interfaces. Once an

organization builds or ports a system to use a cloud provider’s offerings,

As IT departments introduce cloud solutions in the context of their traditional

datacenter, new challenges arise. Standardized mechanisms for dealing with

lifecycle management, licensing, and chargeback for shared cloud infrastructure

are just some of the management and governance issues cloud providers must

Business leaders will want to use multiple cloud providers in their IT solutions

and will need to monitor system performance across these solutions. Providers

must supply consistent formats to monitor cloud applications and service

It is clear that the opportunity for those who effectively utilize cloud computing in

their organizations is great. However, these opportunities are not without risks and

barriers. It is our belief that the value of cloud computing can be fully realized only

Customers expect that the cloud services they use will be as open as the rest of

their IT choices. As an open cloud becomes a reality, business leaders will benefit

in several ways.

As an organization chooses a provider or architecture or usage model, an open

cloud will make it easy for them to use a different provider or architecture as

the business environment changes. If the organization needs to change

providers because of new partnerships, acquisition, customer requests or