SIENA European Roadmap on Grid and Cloud Standards for e-Science and Beyond

Introduction: Forces Driving Change
Powerful economic and environmental forces are driving a major evolution in the way
information and communications technology (ICT) is provisioned for user communities
in industry and the public sector. Economies of scale are driving consolidation of IT resources
into a smaller number of ever larger data centers. Data centers with hundreds of thousands
of computational and storage units are no longer uncommon. Considerations of the cost
of powering and cooling such large concentrations of electronic equipment, together with
environmental concerns, drive the placing of such data centers in geographic locations
where power is plentiful and inexpensive. As communities become more dependent on ICT
resources, the desire to assert their ownership of their data, legal concerns on the locality
of the data, and the need for geographical redundancy may lead to a diffusion of data
centres. The forces now driving change within ICT are many and potentially contradictory,
leading to different solutions that optimise the needs of different communities and their
use cases.
These forces and their consequences simultaneously enable and drive the move towards a
utility model of ICT. The current manifestation of this model is cloud computing through
the commoditisation of the underlying virtualisation technology and the globalisation of
service provision. The dynamic flexibility and reduced cost of accessing ICT resources in the
cloud are beginning to overwhelm most other considerations on provisioning ICT resources.
Such a fundamental shift poses numerous challenges to user communities. For example
the Integrated Sustainable Pan-<strong>European</strong> Infrastructure for Researchers in Europe (EGI-
InSPIRE) project partially funded by the EC is responding to the demands from its user
communities by exploring aspects of cloud computing, notably flexible and elastic
provisioning, within its grid of federated resource providers. This document addresses a
number of these challenges, with a primary focus on standardization and interoperability
of the infrastructures built around the utility model.
Finally, market forces may be working against standardization in cloud computing 6 .
The differing requirements of diverse customer communities lead naturally to market
segmentation. These differing requirements also enable vendor differentiation through
the development of different cloud architectures to address different market segments.
Competition among vendors can then lead to locking customers into distinct cloud
offerings.
The <strong>SIENA</strong> <strong>European</strong> <strong>Roadmap</strong> on Grid and Cloud Standards for e-Science and Beyond
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6] See article “Cloud Computing Standards – Not This Year”, by John Considine, January 2011 at
cloudcomputing.sys-con.com/node/1691805