Google and Microsoft agree it's still too early in cloud history to talk about API standards

'We don't even know what a cloud application is yet,' insist vendors

Google and Microsoft rather amicably agreed today that it's still too early to agree on standard APIs across cloud vendors.

A set of APIs could give customers more choice in mixing and matching hosts and enable them to start and finish contracts more swiftly. But the two technology giants claim that it's still too early in the game to agree on a set approach to building for cloud, let alone hosting it.

Speaking on a "Future of Cloud" panel at IP Expo in London today, Microsoft chief technology officer of Azure Mark Russinovich said that when he is asked why cloud providers can't standardise APIs for the cloud, he replies, "We haven't figured out what cloud applications are going to look like, so it's too early just to change [what we do]".

Another problem, he said, is that different vendors already have different, established platforms and "ways they model things", and changing it all would be "complicated".

Russinovich voiced a particular distaste for growing industry support around OpenStack when Computing last spoke to him, stating that Azure was "much more evolved".

Matt McNeill, head of Google Cloud platform for UK and Ireland, somewhat unsurprisingly echoed Russinovich's views: "The big problem we have when we talk about cloud is we don't know what it means anymore," said McNeill.

"It means so many things. One element is classic VMs we're familiar with, and they still exist - but I think they will be commoditised, and are already. If you look at how the price has dropped over 18 months, you'll see that. So the traditional tendency to buy rather than rent is swapping over.

"But, more interestingly, when you start breaking it down, there's a whole new class of applications that can deliver capabilities and efficiencies at cost that you can't see today. So the move into this platform-first mentality is going to be exciting to see in the future."

Howard Ting, senior vice president of marketing (plus "product dreamer" and "company builder", according to his LinkedIn profile) for virtualisation and storage company Nutanix, chimed in that "enterprises built purely on bits and bytes... companies with just IT at their core, will be a big area of growth".

"[Companies] like Uber and AirBnB have no physical assets and don't own anything - they're just apps."

McNeill added: "I don't think we've seen what cloud can really do yet.

"To take advantage of it in the next five to 10 years, it will mean rethinking the way applications are designed. When people come to cloud today, if they're starting something new, their industry's grown over the last few years - they're doing things very differently from the way they were architected 10 years ago."

He suggested that the psychology of most organisations is still holding many back, and that standards cannot be expected while so many still refuse to jump in.

"I don't think we're going to see a hybrid [cloud] for quite a long time - in enterprise, people just don't want to re-engineer an SAP instance."