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Should Amazon Define Cloud Standards?: Page 2 of 2

Let's consider some proprietary technologies that became standards (independent or defacto) that we are living with today. SQL started out life being developed by IBM, [1] [2] [3] and was subsequently picked up by Relation Software (now Oracle) and eventually IBM itself. SQL was made into an ANSI project in 1986. There were other languages available but for good or ill, we have SQL. The Win-Tel franchise dominated servers and desktops, still does, in enterprises and that meant software developers where writing to that platform.

Justin Santa Barbara compares Amazons AWS API's to Microsoft Win32 API in The Apache Elephant Graveyard pointing out that projects like WINE, a Windows emulator, tried to implement and keep up with changes to the Win32 API. The alternative to Win32 was Portable Operating System Interface (POSIX), but that never really took off for Windows. And let's not forget Microsoft's Office document formats which are closed, but were, and are, often mimicked with varying degrees of success.

Chasing a vendor API is foolish. Even if that vendor is a good steward of their own API's, which Amazon appears to be.

According to Enstratus CTO George Reese who has seen it all while integrating 14+ cloud services into his company's management service, Amazon is a good steward of their own API's. "AWS APIs are the ugliest APIs on the market. But they are the most reliable. I define reliable as first not breaking between versions and second having full feature coverage. Amazon has never broken API compatibility. Never," he said in a conversation on Twitter. Randy Bias, CTO and co-founder of Cloudscaling, concurs.

API changes can weak havoc on customers and services that rely on them. I asked if Amazon feels increased pressure to not change the API or at least do so in non-disruptive ways and they said "With the number of customers relying on AWS, we take great care to ensure that any changes we make to the services – API or otherwise – do not disrupt customers' architecture or applications."

Frankly, the cloud software vendors and open source projects in the world could easily just by-pass Amazon and be highly successful. There are enough requirements that any creative company could provide critical services. While companies like Enstratus and Rightscale ease inter-cloud management (among other things) and cloud software like Cloudstack and Openstack want to integrate where possible, they do much more than simply gluing stuff together. While I haven't asked them if they would rather spend their time integrating cloud services or developing their own services, I am going to bet that they'd rather do the latter. In fact, I agree whole heartedly with Wardley's assertion that cloud vendors should focus on differentiating on features and not API's. Having an openly developed standard clear of IP issues and implemented by a majority of vendors and service providers would be far more useful than hitching the cloud standards wagon to a disinterested third party like Amazon.

References, right?
[1] History of SQL
[2] Wikipedia: SQL
[3] SELECT * FROM SQL History