Standard Units of Measure for IaaS

The worldwide market for cloud services—encompassing both dedicated services available via private clouds and shared services via public clouds—could top $148.8 billion in 2014, up from $68.3 billion in 2010 . The sheer, and growing, volume of available services make it challenging for any organization to assess their options, measure what services are being delivered and what attributes exist for each service.

Organizations need a way to compare services from competing providers of cloud services, as well as with their own internal capabilities. Such comparisons need to be “quantitative” on a like-for-like or “apples-to-apples” basis (e.g., quantity of consumption, period of usage, etc.) and “qualitative” on a set of service assurance attributes (e.g., degree of elasticity, degree of service level, etc.). However, there is no standard, vendor-independent unit of measure equivalent to million instructions per second (MIPS) and other measures used for mainframes that allow such comparison. This is partly because there are no common measurements for the technical units of capacity being sold, and no common way to describe the qualitative attributes of cloud services. Consequently, organizations either try to fit individual Cloud-Provider’s models to their business problems, or embark on costly and lengthy request for proposal (RFP) processes in an attempt to conform the providers to a set of parameters that can be compared.

The Open Data Center Alliance recognizes the need for development of Standard Units of Measure (SUoM) to describe the quantitative and qualitative attributes of services to enable easier, more precise comparison and discovery of the marketplace. This Usage Model is designed to provide subscribers of cloud services with a framework and associated attributes used to describe and measure the capacity, performance and quality of a cloud service.

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