This chapter explores the challenges of cloud platform interoperability and makes a case for cloud platform metadata as a next frontier opportunity for open innovation and open source software (OSS) tooling. Cloud platforms that are dominant, as well as their potential disruptors, have an open innovation opportunity with respect to improved interoperability and metadata tooling, and this chapter explains why. This opportunity is huge and therefore the current dominant players may be disrupted by up-and-coming players that are leaner and nimbler. At the heart of every modern cloud application and cloud platforms are data models.
These data models define the metadata (data about data) and the structure of the underlying database. The data modeling tools market is highly fragmented, making it difficult to compare models across apps and cloud platforms, so data modelers and architects are often reduced to using spreadsheets for this task, and thereby lose the richness of data modeling. This chapter looks at data models, tooling, and open data standards as a means of fostering data interoperability within and between cloud platforms.
