From the IEE Web site: The purpose of the guide is to assist cloud computing vendors and users in developing, building, and using standards-based cloud computing products and services, which should lead to increased portability, commonality, and interoperability. Cloud Computing systems contain many disparate elements. For each element there are often multiple options, each with different externally visible interfaces, file formats, and operational conventions. In many cases these visible interfaces, formats, and conventions have different semantics. This guide enumerates options, grouped in a logical fashion called “profiles,” for such definitions of interfaces, formats, and conventions, from a variety of sources. In this way, cloud ecosystem participants will tend towards more portability, commonality, and interoperability, growing the cloud computing adoption rate overall.