1. Oleg LODYGENSKY lodygens@lal.in2p3.fr Etienne URBAH urbah@lal.in2p3.fr LAL, Univ Paris-Sud, IN2P3/CNRS, Orsay, Francelodygens@lal.in2p3.frurbah@lal.in2p3.fr Official and de facto standards which may be useful for the design of middleware permitting remote data processing (cloud computing) and distributed data processing (grid computing) The main point is that the GFD.147 recommendation of OGF, named GLUE Specification v. 2.0, permits to describe grid and cloud entities. This allows different GLUE compliant grids to discover and understand each other, so that this GLUE specification should be used as foundation for all other grid and cloud standards and recommendations for interoperability. Interfaces between Clients, Functionalities and Resources existing in remote data processing infrastructures (clouds) and in distributed data processing infrastructures (grids). These 2 diagrams uses color coding, with grid and cloud functionalities and resources in green, interfaces permitting to access them in blue. Besides, official and de facto standards are inside square brackets. Final Users are scientists, which are interested only in 'payload' functionalities, like data, instruments, activities, and jobs, but grids and clouds require also 'support' functionalities, in particular information publication and discovery, security management, monitoring, logging and accounting. Therefore, intero- perability requires to standardize all 'client interfaces' shown in blue, at the left. Grid and cloud functionalities are not independent of each other, but most functionalities require to access resources managed by other functionalities, in particular : Information items, Security descriptors, Logging records, Accounting records. So, if we do not standardize 'backend' interfaces shown in blue, at the right, then different instances implementing the same functionality will not be able to correctly access required resources, and interoperability will not be achieved. Therefore, we have to standardize also these 'backend' interfaces. This task is huge, so we have assess, for each 'backend' interface, if standardization is really needed, and we have to prioritize, with following suggestions : 1)Cloud and grid computing require information publication and discovery. For interoperability, we already have the GLUE specification as foundation, and we urgently need GLUE renderings, in particular for LDAP, XML, and SQL. Clients performing queries do not need that the information records are really kept in a relational database, but that queries may be expressed in a (perhaps limited) SQL syntax. 2)Clouds and grids are valuable targets for criminal organizations, so that clouds and grids absolutely require high-grade security management, and interoperability between grids (an later clouds) require a common set of standards. We should confirm IGTF as Trust Anchor and SPG (formerly JSPG) for general security policies. For authentication, we should phase out GSI proxies in favor of RFC3820-compliant X509 proxies as soon as possible. For authorization, VOMS extensions of X509 proxies work correctly, but SAML assertions issued for example by VOMS servers also permit restrictions of authorization, and perhaps easier delegation. 3)Security audit absolutely requires log records for jobs and other activities which clients can submit. Interoperability between grids require that the format of the log records is standardized. We have no published standard yet, and we urgently need one. The JSDL working group of OGF is working on such a standard named 'Activity Instance Document Schema'. We should quickly assess if the draft available at http://forge.gridforum.org/sf/go/doc15395?nav=1 is appropriate. If yes, we should help the JSDL working group finalize it as an OGF recommendation, and implement it. 4) Accounting will become more and more important, as grid computing evolves from a research topic to a valuable commodity like cloud computing. The GFD.98 recommendation of OGF, named 'Usage Record - Format Recommendation', is already published. We should assess if this recommendation is appropriate, and if necessary, improve it, then implement it. 5)For Job management, we should improve following recommendations so that they both use GLUE 2.0 terms, semantics, and are consistent with each other :  GDF.108 'OGSA® Basic Execution Service Version 1.0',  GFD.136 'Job Submission Description Language (JSDL) Specification, Version 1.0' By order of importance, this comes last because job management is used by very few other functionalities. As long as the 4 first functionalities mentioned above are correctly implemented according to common standards, interoperation of job management between different clouds and grids could then be quickly achieved using bridges implementing an adequate adapter for each job management idiom, though perhaps with reduced scalability compared to full interoperability.