Keynoting at OSCON 2010
by Peter Galli on July 22, 2010 10:01am
Jean Paoli, the General Manager for Interoperability Strategy at Microsoft, delivered a keynote address at the O'Reilly Open Source Convention (OSCON) in Portland, OR, this morning titled "Open Cloud, Open Data."
During his keynote, Paoli addressed four foundational elements that comprise an open cloud platform: Data Portability, Standards, Ease of Migration and Deployment, and Developer Choice.
Paoli also talked about why Microsoft views these elements as a catalyst for the industry conversations about interoperability in the cloud, including how Data Portability allows customers to own their own data, whether stored on-premises or in the cloud, necessitating cloud platforms to facilitate the movement of customer data in and out of the cloud.
Jean Paoli
Cloud platforms should also support commonly used industry standards so as to facilitate interoperability with other software and services that support the same standards, while also providing a secure migration path that preserves existing investments and should enable the co-existence between on-premise software and cloud services, Paoli said.
This will enable customers to run "customer clouds" and partners, including hosters, to run "partner clouds" as well as take advantage of public cloud platform services. Cloud platforms should also offer developers choice in software development tools, languages and runtimes, he told attendees.
Microsoft also launched a new website today, designed to show these elements through supporting technical examples.
In addition, several Microsoft senior architects will use their technical sessions at OSCON to provide in-depth software engineering sessions on the technical underpinnings of the four elements for open source developers.
"We are introducing the interoperability elements of a cloud platform with a set of supporting technical examples to help frame and organize further discussions within existing industry organizations and with our customers, partners and other IT companies, including competitors," Paoli said.
Over the past two years, Microsoft has increased its open source community project work to support cloud platform interoperability, and will use OSCON to present some of the new and existing developments currently in progress that support open source developers working in mixed IT environments.
The release of Windows Azure Software Development Kits (SDK) for a number of languages including Java and PHP is one example of the work the company is doing to help developers. Microsoft also recently sponsored Java and PHP SDKs to support the Open Data Protocol (OData), a REST-based Web protocol for manipulating data across platforms ranging from mobile to server to cloud.
"Today, we're also releasing the OData Client for Objective-C (for iPhone & Mac), a new version for iPhone and Mac, with the source code posted on CodePlex, our open source code repository," Paoli said.
Also available today is the latest version of Windows Azure Command Line Tools for PHP to the Microsoft Web Platform Installer, which let developers use a simple command-line tool without an Integrated Development Environment to easily package and deploy new or existing PHP applications to Windows Azure.
CoApp, a CodePlex Foundation project, aims to create a vibrant Open Source ecosystem on Windows by providing the technologies needed to build a complete community-driven Package Management System, along with tools to make it easier for open source developers to build applications targeting the Windows platform.
There are currently 12 committers to the project and those interested in joining can get more information here.
All of this underscores Microsoft's ongoing commitment to openness, from the way it build products, collaborates with customers, and works with others in the industry, while Geeknet, Inc. recently reported that there are some 350,000 Open Source projects now compatible with Windows.
You can find an overview of Microsoft's OSCON presentations here, while more information about open source updates and technical bridges is available here.