The CloudEthernet Forum (CEF) and the Metro Ethernet Forum (MEF) are launching an “Open Cloud Project” to advance their cloud service delivery paradigm for service providers, industry vendors and over-the-top (OTT) cloud service providers.
The Open Cloud Project includes a dedicated proof of concept test laboratory based in Silicon Valley to provide ongoing testing and support for the iterative development of the CEF’s CloudE 1.0 open cloud environment. It will also provide the basis of future compliance and benchmark testing. Informed by the experience and learning of its close association with the MEF, and seeing the benefits that rapid, iterative development has brought to the cloud industry, the CEF is taking the pioneering step of integrating testing into the standards development process right from the start.
Initial work will be focused on three areas: application performance management, cloud security and traffic load balancing. The project’s open test program will lay the groundwork for a fully inter-working cloud environment, and the advancement of best practices to manage OTT and cloud services.
“This is vitally important work if we are to avoid fragmentation of the cloud,” explains James Walker, CEF President and Vice President of Managed Network Services at Tata Communications. “Cloud services rely on the end to end interoperability of so many players – enterprises, network and datacenter equipment vendors, datacenter operators, orchestration layers, management and reporting platforms, security devices, network service providers – the list goes on. The MEF has shown a successful model of defining service types and attributes which everyone can agree to and align with, which through this test bed we can adapt and bring to the cloud industry. Unless we can define industry best practices and global standards to establish an open cloud environment, cloud services run the risk of becoming more and more fragmented and difficult to integrate.”
