HACKER Q&A
📣 wizofaus

What work is being done on non-proprietary cloud computing protocols?


It's occurred to me a few times that I don't mind if our architecture uses cloud-based serverless tech, lambdas, message queues, storage etc. - but we should be talking to such endpoints using non-proprietary protocols that would allow us to switch to another cloud provider if necessary (possibly even our own non-cloud-based provider, esp. while developing/debugging). Is any work being done on this front? Is it likely to be successful? What are the major hurdles?

  👤 tomByrer Accepted Answer ✓
Basically JavaScript Edge functions/apps: https://wintercg.org/

Main people behind this is CloudFlare, so this will likely formalized API from CloudFlare Workers that over vendors will agree on. I was fairly hot on CFW until I decided I didn't want vendor lick-in. https://github.com/tombyrer/awesome-cloudflare-workers

👤 wizofaus
From what I can read there are quite a few open message queue protocols already in existence (AMQP, MQTT etc.) and AWS at least claim to support them but I'm not sure how feasible it is to rely on that entirely, has anyone tried? Likewise there are plenty of existing open filesystem storage protocols (sftp etc.) - would it be practical to use such a protocol exclusively to access S3 storage (again, aws claim to support it)? A protocol to upload runnable-code to a cloud-compute instance or schedule it to be run based on various triggers might be asking too much and necessarily require vendor specific messaging though.
👤 nicolaslem
You are basically describing the vision behind Open Stack. It used to have a fair amount of traction in the 2010's but I rarely hear about it anymore.
👤 wizofaus
As per info from an HN commentator - S3 is now such a protocol that can be used for accessing cloud-based storage at least. I had assumed it was proprietary (and certainly never used it for anything other than AWS S3).