DMTF Cloud Management Standards

Working to Address Management Interoperability for Cloud Systems

(Having finished its work, the Cloud Management Initiative is currently quiesced. If you are interested in expanding Cloud Management Initiative and contribute to the creation of additional DMTF Cloud Management standards, please contact us.)

Technologies like cloud computing and virtualization have been embraced by enterprise IT managers seeking to better deliver services to their customers, lower IT costs and improve operational efficiencies.

DMTF has multiple standards and working groups addressing cloud management, and the Cloud Management Initiative brings this work together for an integrated approach. Focused on achieving interoperable cloud infrastructure management between cloud service providers and their consumers and developers, the Cloud Management Initiative also promotes adoption of these standards by the industry.

The Cloud Management Initiative produced standards and whitepapers in the following areas:

• Cloud Infrastructure Management Interface (CIMI) - describes the model and protocol for management interactions between a cloud Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) provider and the consumers of an IaaS service. The basic resources of IaaS (machines, storage, and networks) are modeled to provide consumer management access to an implementation of IaaS and facilitate portability between cloud implementations that support the specification.
• Open Virtualization Format (OVF) – a portable metadata format for the distribution of virtual systems onto and between virtualization platforms. OVF provides the industry with a standard packaging format for software solutions based on virtual systems. OVF has been adopted and published by the International Organization for Standardization (ISO) as ISO 17203.
• Cloud Audit Data Federation (CADF) Data Format and Interface Definitions - a standard which specifies audit events which span cloud and service providers, and make these audit events comprehensible, consistent, shareable, and merge-able. The standard specifies an event model with data needed to certify, self-manage and self-audit application security in cloud environments.
• Software Identification and Entitlement Usage Metrics Whitepaper– a document which describes information useful in identifying licensed software products, and to trace and gather the use of the software and other entitlement usage metrics across the span of deployments. A SoftwareID CIM profile was also created which utilized these concepts.

Alliance Partners

The initiative worked in collaboration with a number of industry organizations to develop solid partnerships that help unify management initiatives. These organizations are shown in the Alliance Partner website.