Cloud Foundry has launched the Open Service Broker API project, an effort that brings together some of the industry's largest players in cloud computing in the name of cross-vendor integration and interoperability. Here are the key details from a blog post by Cloud Foundry executive director Abby Kearns:
This collaborative project with Fujitsu, Google, IBM, Pivotal, Red Hat and SAP enables developers, ISVs and SaaS vendors to deliver services to applications running within cloud-native offerings — including Cloud Foundry, OpenShift and Kubernetes — in the most straightforward, effective way possible.
By sharing this technology more broadly, we help to standardize a critical component of cloud-native applications – services. The mission of the Open Service Broker API project is to collaboratively advance the development of a standardized approach to connecting services to platforms. This benefits absolutely everyone.
Our shared vision was to develop an industry-standard service broker that allows developers, ISVs and SaaS vendors a single, simple and elegant way to produce, sell, buy and consume software on public and private clouds. The Open Service Broker API accelerates the expansion of the global cloud ecosystem by providing a single path add services to applications. Now developers can write and configure against a single API and reach many developers across multiple platforms.
The API was originally created for Cloud Foundry's own purposes, and a 2013 rewrite brought major improvements, Kearns writes. Subsequently, the likes of Google and Microsoft began exposing their cloud platforms through the API, helping build the momentum around it that led to the open source project.
The enterprise technology landscape is littered with the bones of countless much-heralded cross-vendor partnerships, but it's hard to be skeptical about this one.
"There's nothing not to like API interoperability, and common directories across vendors is very important for the success of the API economy as well as next-gen apps," says Constellation Research VP and principal analyst Holger Mueller. "Unless the vendors left out form an opposing initiative—something the tech industry has seen a lot—this is purely good news. And I think it is unlikely that someone will substantially challenge this, as interoperability and adherence to standards are key for all vendors."
Microsoft, Amazon Web Services and Oracle are the major players missing from the list of vendors involved at the project's launch. But given Microsoft's past work with the API and its general embrace of open source under the leadership of CEO Satya Nadella, it's not hard to picture the company eventually lending some engineering resources to the project. Meanwhile, AWS and Oracle would make a very unlikely pairing for a competing effort, given the rhetoric that's been traded between their respective management teams, Mueller notes.