Opening up Cloud software certifications

As the cloud infrastructure and software market evolves, open-source initiatives are competing toe-to-toe with proprietary solutions. Amazon’s AWS was seen as the Apple of the cloud; OpenStack is the equivalent of Android, helping organisations escape being locked into a single vendor’s cloud solutions by commoditising infrastructure.

But even within open-source, the old habits of software vendors die hard. As with long-established communities like Linux – where partners certify their software solutions against the predominant enterprise Linux flavour – the tasks of testing and certifying cloud infrastructure such as OpenStack have, in some cases, been proprietary to the vendor running the certification programme.

These programmes are usually opaque from the customer’s point of view. Some vendors actually do subject third-party software to rigorous compatibility testing, while others’ testing programmes are little more than a tick-box exercise and a certificate. But the customer will not know the difference, and what the true value of that ‘certified compatibility’ is.

Removing customer lock-ins
This model is flawed. Having vendors manage their own certification programmes may have been relevant 15 years ago when the Internet was becoming mainstream, enterprises didn’t understand the open-source model, and wanted guarantees on interoperability. But with the open-source community model mature and thriving, there’s little reason to run a proprietary certification programme, other than to lock customers in to a particular vendor.

The lock-in works like this. A larger vendor may not want a smaller, disruptive company’s product to run on its platform because it may affect sales of some other product in its corporate portfolio. So the larger vendor can choose not to certify or support the product on its platform, which means the customer may not be able to realise advantages from the innovations of upcoming vendors. This way, the larger vendor builds a competitive barrier, which I believe goes against the ethos of an open-source community.

Opening up
This is why a new OpenStack initiative – open compatibility testing – is hugely significant for the cloud. Starting as a grassroots movement from a number of the technical leads in the OpenStack community, the project is building a standard, open set of tools that software vendors use to self-certify compatibility of their solutions with the OpenStack codebase.

Vendors will setup a testing lab in-house according to guidelines developed by the community, link these labs to the community-driven OpenStack continuous integration system, and dynamically expose the results of certification tests via a public dashboard.

When this is done, any organisation looking to adopt OpenStack will have access to accurate, objective information via the dashboard on how well a given vendor’s solution works with OpenStack infrastructure, with no involvement by software companies with vested interests. Everybody will be able to see what tests were conducted, and what processes followed to arrive at the compatibility test results – so organisations can judge for themselves which solutions will best suit their current and future requirements.

Community support
The real benefit of an open-source community is that it is self-policing. If a proprietary solution from a vendor adds only questionable value, the community will simply develop its own variant and make that available for free. This accelerates innovation, and stops marketing muscle winning over technology.

The move to open-sourcing certifications for OpenStack software is a big step towards breaking down one of the final competitive barriers that larger vendors have traditionally used to extract margins from customers and limit innovation. It will help to level the cloud playing field, giving newer software developers the same opportunities to contribute to the community as established players. It also helps move the vision of a vendor-agnostic cloud a step closer.