The Open Data Center Alliance (ODCA) today published its usage model on cloud infrastructure. Business consumers can use this model, along with related ODCA usage models, to guide their cloud service acquisition decisions and increase the standardization of cloud service consumption.

Although Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) is often distilled to three components - compute, networking and storage - they are more appropriately considered as a cohesive set of aggregate resources that can be purchased, provisioned and managed as a whole. This is especially important as the lines between Software as a Service (SaaS), Platform as a Service (PaaS), and IaaS blur.

The ODCA cloud infrastructure usage model builds on content defined in its other IaaS usage models aimed at compute, networking, storage and related services and management facilities. This model defines how the resources aggregate to form cloud infrastructure, and how that infrastructure may be consumed and managed holistically. It also includes two usage scenarios depicting how an aggregated IaaS approach can work, and shows the interrelationship among the various ODCA usage models. Finally, it recommends industry actions that should be taken across cloud subscribers, cloud service providers, and the standards ecosystem to help accelerate cloud adoption.

ODCA usage models further the Alliance's vision of a simpler, more secure, more efficient path to cloud computing by documenting the most pressing challenges and needed solutions for cloud deployment. Each usage model describes the specific technology and service requirements for deploying a different cloud computing scenario and identifies where open standards need to be met. All of the ODCA's usage models are available for free download here.