In my business we deal with companies that are by their very nature risk averse and hence I only play with the newest tech for our internal projects, the occasional customer emergency and in my free time. Even so I have watched Microsoft’s Azure pretty closely and while I am confident that eventually we will take cloud computer for granted as we do dynamic web technologies now, I am also pretty sure that we still don’t know exactly what and how the real impact will take shape. Without clear SLAs and Pricing I just can’t gauge how reasonable it will be for a customer of size X with application of type Y to opt for Azure or any other cloud computing platform. That belief also drives me to think that the Open Cloud Manifesto is at best irrelevent and at worst a major impediment to getting where we want to go. If we don’t know what the best end state will be because we have yet to really evolve the technology in the real world then how can a group of people (any group) really hope to lay out the rules of the road. There isn’t a road built yet after all.

It has been proposed that guidance is needed to ensure that solutions are “open”. I can only assume that this means that they want code deployed on vendor A’s platform can be moved to vendor B’s platform unchanged (the classic case of wanting to not gamble on vendor lock in). While that is not specifically stated, I just don’t see any other interpretation that makes sense.

Time will tell, but I suspect we are several years of market testing and evolution from a point where we can even begin to have this conversation intelligently.

To read more on this topic I will point you to blog posts by Chris Auld and Michelle Bustamante. I must say that I agree with them for the most part.