Great post over at the Computer World blog on the subject of cloud API standardization. In the post, Jeff Boles says "there only needs to be standardization around a few core "activities" that are targeted more at interoperability than uniform services and structure" He goes on to say "what I care about, as an end user.

, is really carrying out a couple of key steps, in the same way, regardless of who the provider is."

I also found his insight into what he describes the ability to "crawl a web of potential services and see which APIs could be replaced or duplicated by other services. Conceptually again, this could mean distributing your application and data across many different providers."

Check out the whole article at http://blogs.computerworld.com/cloudy_clouds_and_standards

While I'm sharing interesting links, the folks over at Rightscale have posted an article on Cloud Lock-in. In it they say "The higher the cloud layer you operate in, the greater the lock-in. Lock-in occurs with this vendor to the extent it is prohibitively expensive or time-consuming to run your application elsewhere or move your data elsewhere. Whether this "elsewhere" is another vendor or whether it is your own infrastructure is not important: if you can't move, or it costs a lot or takes a long time to do so, you're locked-in."

Check out the entire post at http://blog.rightscale.com/2009/02/19/the-skinny-on-cloud-lock-in/

• EDS's David Gee on Cloud Computing
• On the Subject of Various Industrial Machines