Toward an Open Cloud Marketplace: Vision and First Steps

Cloud computing´s transition from a subject of research and innovation to a critical infrastructure is proceeding incredibly quickly. One potentially dangerous consequence of this speedy transition is the premature adoption and ossification of the models, technologies, and standards underlying this critical infrastructure. Further exacerbating this issue, innovative research on production-scale platforms is becoming the purview of just a few public cloud providers. Specifically, academic research communities are effectively excluded from contributing meaningfully to the evolution--not to mention innovation and healthy mutation--of cloud computing technologies. As our society and economy´s dependency on cloud computing increases, so does the realization that the academic research community can´t be shut out from contributing to the design and evolution of this critical infrastructure. Here, the authors provide an alternative vision--the Open Cloud Exchange (OCX), a public cloud marketplace in which many stakeholders, rather than just a single cloud provider, participate in implementing and operating the cloud. This will create an ecosystem to bring the innovation of a broader community to bear on a much healthier and more efficient cloud marketplace.