The OASIS international consortium has launched the Cloud Application Management for Platforms (CAMP) Technical Committee, a project to define the interoperability standard for managing applications in Platform as a Service (PaaS) environments.

CAMP will leverage similarities between commercial and open-source PaaS products to produce a simple API that is language-, framework-, and platform-agnostic.

Using CAMP, companies will be able to migrate their cloud applications from one PaaS vendor to another by mapping the requirements of applications to the specific capabilities of the underlying platform.

“Companies are starting to experiment with PaaS, but even as they do, it becomes clear that variations between the vendors’ application interfaces will make it hard to move applications from platform to platform. That looks a lot like vendor lock-in, and it’s putting customers off,” said Rachel Chalmers, VP of Research at The 451 Group. “It is encouraging to see that this issue has been grasped by the vendor community and is being addressed within the OASIS framework.”

“CAMP’s goal is to define a simple standard RESTful API along with a JSON based protocol, with an extensibility framework that enables interoperability across multiple vendors’ offerings. Using CAMP, users can manage their application lifecycles and move applications between clouds easily,” said Martin Chapman of Oracle, chair of the OASIS CAMP Technical Committee. “We expect CAMP to foster an ecosystem of common tools, plugins, libraries and frameworks, which will allow vendors to offer greater value-add.”

Work on CAMP was initiated in late 2010 by a group of seven companies, Oracle, Red Hat, Rackspace, Cloudsoft, Huawei, CloudBees, and Software AG. They transitioned the project to OASIS in order to ensure CAMP would benefit from broad industry participation in an open, collaborative setting.

“CAMP is one of several new Cloud standardization projects at OASIS that make use of JSON and REST,” noted Laurent Liscia, OASIS executive director and CEO. “We see the standardization of CAMP as an important step in guiding the industry into an ecosystem of interoperable and portable cloud systems.”

The CAMP Technical Committee is open to all interested parties, and new members are encouraged to join at any time.

Archives of the work are accessible to both members and non-members, and OASIS invites public review and comment on the work.