Now that the cloud has been around long enough to transition from cutting edge to proven technology, standards have become a topic of discussion. Businesses have no guarantee that applications and content hosted in one cloud service will be easy to integrate or migrate to another cloud service. Standards may not be sexy, but they help reduce the risk of vendor and product lock-in, improve interoperability and allow effort to be focused on differentiators instead of commodity features. However, just defining cloud computing took years, so formally standardizing it is unlikely move quickly.

A number of organizations like the Open Group and   Open Cloud Consortium  are striving to standardize various aspects of cloud computing. Two efforts, OpenStack and CloudStack, are positioning themselves to be defacto standards and have an impressive list of vendor backers. This week one of these efforts, Rackspace-supported OpenStack, celebrated its second anniversary. Although OpenStack has over 150 supporters, including IBM and Red Hat that finally signed on as an official supporter in April, its reign as “the” cloud-computing standard is far from assured.

OpenStack, which began as an effort by Rackspace and NASA to be a “ubiquitous open source cloud computing platform for public and private clouds,” but it is far from ubiquitous at this point. In fact, it is not even the only active open source cloud standardization effort. Citrix defected from OpenStack in April in favor of its own CloudStack, which is being incubated by Apache, citing concerns about the stability and maturity of OpenStack. Samer Dholakia of Citrix openly criticized OpenStack saying,

“we were left with no choice but to pursue an alternative open source project. We can’t afford to wait a year or two for the technical maturation process that needs to happen.”

OpenStack retorted with the technical equivalent of an eye-roll, a new release. Rackspace then quickly announced the availability of a production-ready service powered by OpenStack. Rackspace’s release, however was cautious. They allowed customers sign up for access to their new service, but granted access incrementally.

Why does this discord in the cloud standards space matter? For cloud vendors, the presence of multiple standards means vendors will need to select which standards to support or implement more than one standard. Both choices can be costly. Supporting multiple standards can drive up development cost, and choosing one standard over another can mean lost revenue opportunities.

From a customer perspective, if there is no common architecture, programming interfaces or general baseline, as businesses host more data and services in the cloud, they are assuming the risk that a misbehaved vendor could essentially hold them hostage. In the long run, these vendors will be driven from the market, but in the short run, it can be an expensive nightmare – especially for a small company. Even if a vendor is great, if a company outgrows the provider’s services or needs to pursue a technology not supported on the platform, a migration in the current environment can easily prove more expensive and time consuming than an initial roll out.