The fourth annual OpenStack Summit is kicking off with a bang in Vancouver with the launch of a new community certification initiative that has rallied some of the biggest names from the upstream ecosystem behind a common challenge: interoperability. Or more accurately, the lack thereof.

Providing the ability to move applications among different kinds of infrastructure without the significant modification historically involved in such migrations has been a key priority for the project from the very outset, but there are still several major logistical obstacles standing in the way. One of the biggest is the wide variety of OpenStack implementations out there.

While that does provide organizations with choice, the differences mean that an application written for a particular distribution may not necessarily work on another without serious architectural changes. That makes it difficult to achieve the benefits of combining different types of deployments that the community’s interoperability efforts ultimately aspire to realize.

The new OpenStack Powered program aims to address that challenge through the establishment of compatibility standards for core parts of the project that provide a common baseline for developers across different implementations. Fourteen vendors are already participating in the initiative, including Mirantis Inc., which announced its own certification program at the same time, rival distributor Red Hat Inc. and a number of others.

Many of the same players have also thrown their weight behind the federated identify management feature set to arrive to OpenStack later this year. The upgrade is set to provide administrators with centralized control over user authorizations and permissions across their entire environments, on hosted as well as on-premise deployments of the platform along with the applications running on top.

The functionality should bring cloud interoperability another step closer to the realm of the feasible, but there’s still a long and bumpy road ahead for OpenStack until it reaches the enterprise mainstream. That will require a team effort.
Photo by Kenny Louie via Flickr