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Application portability in cloud computing a work in progress

Cloud computing networks are still largely walled off from each other, making it difficult to move workloads from one cloud service to another or from an internal data center to a cloud provider, Interop keynote speakers said Wednesday. But progress on standards and common formats should eventually allow some portability.

"We'll see a time, probably in this calendar year, where it's easy to move workloads from internal to external clouds, using a software product," said Randy Rowland, senior vice president of product development at Terremark. Customers want assurance that they can bring cloud-based workloads back into the enterprise data center if their circumstances change, he said.

"People are afraid to lock in," Rowland said. Unfortunately, some networking obstacles exist, such as finding an easy way to change IP addresses, he said.

But "that concern around portability will be addressed," Citrix CTO Simon Crosby said. "The vendors know they've got to do this."

Amazon virtual machine images, which are used on Amazon's popular EC2 cloud computing service, are proprietary and difficult to map to enterprise networks, said Alistair Croll, founder of Bitcurrent.

But Crosby noted progress on some fronts, such as the Open Virtualization Format standard, which he said makes workloads independent of the hypervisor, allowing interoperability with multiple virtualization platforms.

Virtualization has improved portability of server-based workloads, but early versions of infrastructure-as-a-service cloud offerings have been weak on the networking front, according to Crosby. New methods of abstracting network resources will be necessary to improve portability.