Interoperability Standards for Multi-cloud Environment

As cloud computing has become a dominant model for distributed computing, with widespread adoption across industries, multi-cloud has been proposed to mitigate various challenges due to the heterogeneity of various cloud providers such as security, privacy, trust, cost of cloud tenants, vendor lock-in etc. The idea of multi-cloud computing has broadened the field of cloud computing and is a popular term in academia and industry.

Broadly three main areas are being explored for multi-cloud computing at present.

1. Interoperability of Clouds
2. Cloud Brokerage
3. Inter-cloud (Introduced by CISCO as an interconnected global “cloud of clouds” that mimics the term Inter-net, “network of networks”)

In this article, we will look at the Interoperability Standards for multi-cloud environments that are crucial for ensuring seamless communication and integration between different cloud providers, services, and platforms. These standards facilitate the exchange of data, workloads, and resources across heterogeneous cloud infrastructures. Following are the key interoperability standards and protocols commonly used in multi-cloud environments:

Cloud Computing Standards:

Cloud Infrastructure Management Interface (CIMI): CIMI is an open standard that defines a common interface for managing cloud infrastructure across multiple cloud providers. It simplifies tasks such as…