In a session on open source in the cloud at the Cloud Connect show in Santa Clara, Calif., Randy Bias of Cloudscaling dropped a bombshell of a statement: “API’s don’t matter.” What Bias was really asking was, “What role do standards play in cloud computing?” With a wry smirk, Bias went on to explain that mimicking Amazon’s APIs, for example, is useless if providers don’t have the ability to deliver all of the features and functions of Amazon’s service, including the things you don’t see like reliability and scaling. Of course APIs matter, but having a functional standardized cloud service management API doesn’t and, I’d argue, never will.
Network Computing