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The Distributed Management Task Force (DMTF), an organization bringing the IT industry together to collaborate on systems management standards development, validation, promotion and adoption, has announced the release of the new Cloud Infrastructure Management Interface (CIMI) specification.
DMTF officials said the new specification standardizes interactions between cloud environments to achieve interoperable cloud infrastructure management between service providers and their consumers and developers, enabling users to manage their cloud infrastructure use easily and without complexity.
The goal is to provide interoperability between enterprise computing and cloud services. DMTF developed CIMI as a self-service interface for infrastructure clouds, allowing users to dynamically provision, configure and administer their cloud usage with a high-level interface that simplifies cloud systems management.
“The CIMI standard is a critical piece for cloud infrastructure management because it alleviates complexity while improving flexibility, portability and security,” said Winston Bumpus, chairman of the board for DMTF, in a statement. “With the release of the CIMI v1.0 specification, DMTF offers a well-rounded, industry-wide solution for simplifying cloud infrastructure management.”
The new specification consists of two components: Cloud Infrastructure Management Interface–(CIMI) Model and REST Interface over HTTP Specification; and Cloud Infrastructure Management Interface–(CIMI) Primer.
The CIMI specification is the centerpiece of DMTF’s Cloud Management Initiative, and is the first standard created by the Cloud Management Working Group (CMWG). DMTF’s Cloud Management Initiative includes contributions from additional working groups, such as the Cloud Auditing Data Federation Working Group (CADF WG); the Network Services Management Working Group (NSM WG); the Software License Management (SLM) Incubator; and the System Virtualization, Partitioning, and Clustering Working Group (SVPC WG). Additional announcements are expected from DMTF cloud-related working groups early next year.
“DMTF has developed an important new standard focused on simplifying cloud infrastructure management,” said Paul Lipton, vice president of industry standards and open source at CA Technologies, in a statement. “CIMI will enable greater interoperability of infrastructure management across a broader range of cloud platforms and represents a significant milestone in the development of secure, cloud management standards for our industry and our customers.”
Working Groups, Incubators Collaborate With Industry Organizations
DMTF working groups and incubators collaborate with a number of industry organizations in an effort to unify their cloud management initiatives. These organizations include the Cloud Security Alliance (CSA), the China Communications Standards Association (CCSA), the China Electronics Standardization Institute (CESI), the Open Data Center Alliance (ODCA), the Storage Networking Industry Association (SNIA), the Open Grid Forum (OGF), the Object Management Group (OMG), The Open Group (TOG), the Metro Ethernet Forum (MEF), the Global Inter-Cloud Technology Forum (GICTF) and the TeleManagement Forum (TMF).
“As an early proponent of the cloud incubator and a leading member of the cloud standards working group, Citrix is pleased to see the Cloud Infrastructure Management Interface (CIMI) standard published and will propose inclusion of the CIMI implementation into the Apache CloudStack project and Citrix CloudPlatform,” said Sheng Liang, CTO of the Cloud Platforms Group at Citrix, in a statement.
Jerome Labat, vice president of research and development at HP Software’s Cloud Automation product unit, said, “Our contributions to CIMI will enable the standard to help customers easily manage their cloud use, while improving portability and security.”
Meanwhile, “The availability of the DMTF CIMI specification is a solid step forward in the standardization that will support interoperable cloud solutions,” Angel Diaz, vice president of software standards at IBM, said in a statement. “When open standards such as CIMI are developed in collaboration with vendors, customers and consortiums such as the Cloud Standards Customer Council, cloud consumers will be able to achieve greater interoperability and portability. The results are faster implementation at a lower cost-leading to greater innovation.”
“The release of the new DMTF Cloud Infrastructure Management Interface (CIMI) standard is another step forward in enabling interoperability and portability between compute clouds,” said Stephen Herrod, CTO of VMware, in a statement. “The ultimate goal is to provide customers choice as to where they can most efficiently and safely run their applications. This may be in an internal cloud within their own data center or in clouds managed by external providers. We have taken a step in this direction with full support of the Open Virtualization Format (OVF). Furthermore, we are committed to working with our partners in developing and supporting the other critical standards that will enable this open cloud computing vision.”
Meanwhile, on Aug 29, the Cloud Security Alliance (CSA) and Fujitsu Laboratories of America announced the launch of the Big Data Working Group which will address the need for collaborative research and solutions to big data security challenges. Chaired by Sreeranga Rajan of Fujitsu Laboratories of America with co-chairs Neel Sundaresan of eBay and Wilco Van Ginkel of Verizon, the CSA Big Data Working Group will work to address the security and privacy issues magnified today by the velocity, volume and variety of big data, such as large-scale cloud infrastructures, diversity of data sources and formats, streaming nature of data acquisition and high-volume inter-cloud migration, the organization said.
“As a recognized leader in development and deployment of large-scale cloud infrastructures, we are pleased to work with our fellow members at the CSA to develop best practices and standards for big data security and privacy,” said Yasunori Kimura, president and CEO of Fujitsu Laboratories of America, in a statement. “We invite companies from around the world facing big data challenges to join us in this important research effort.”
Specifically, the CSA Big Data Working Group will be identifying scalable techniques for data-centric security and privacy problems. In doing so the group will look to crystallize the best practices for security and privacy in big data, help industry and governments with adoption of best practices, establish liaisons with other organizations to coordinate the development of big data security and privacy standards, and accelerate the adoption of novel research aimed to address security and privacy issues.
To address the large number of issues tied to big data security and privacy, the group will focus on six specific themes: big data-scale crypto, cloud infrastructure, data analytics for security, framework and taxonomy, policy and governance, and privacy
“Everyday 2.5 quintillion bytes of data are being created resulting in a myriad number of data security and cloud-computing security concerns,” Sreeranga Rajan, director of software systems innovation at Fujitsu Laboratories of America, said in a statement. “By collaborating as a global community of thought leaders and researchers, we are not only looking to help the industry overcome these challenges but also to leverage new opportunities for the monitoring and detection of security threats enabled by big data.”
The group’s immediate focus will be to develop an experimental platform of test data sets from different industry verticals such as e-commerce and health care. The group’s first research report, due out this fall, will identify the new and different technical and organizational problems when addressing big data security and privacy. Future planned reports include a focus on providing specific actionable information for big data security and privacy, creating standards for big data security and privacy best practices, and establishing security and privacy test beds to help strengthen security and privacy of big data cloud platforms.
Companies and individuals interested in learning more or joining the group can visit this site.