(Beth Pariseau, Senior News Writer, SearchStorage) As interest around the cloud grows, industry experts are debating whether or not to establish a standard application programming interface (API) for sending data to and from cloud service providers.

Proponents of drafting a standard now say it will boost customer adoption to the cloud. Opponents say attempts to standardize an "on ramp" to the cloud this early might stifle innovation.

People on both sides made their point during a Cloud Storage Summit held by the Storage Networking Industry Association (SNIA) in January. Sajai Krishnan, CEO of cloud storage startup ParaScale Inc., said the prospect was raised of basing a potential standard on Amazon's Simple Storage Service (S3) API, which Krishnan said offers advances in the use of the HTTP to write and retrieve data over a network.

Amazon rival Nirvanix Inc. also uses HTTP to do writes, but has added more advanced features than S3, such as file system directory structures. "It's not the same old NFS mount," Krishnan said. "The community is still debating what is standard out there."

Vincent Franceschini, chairman of SNIA's board of directors, said the group is looking at Amazon's API as a de facto standard because it's one of the earliest and most widely adopted cloud services. However, Franceschini says Amazon has turned down offers to participate in formal discussions.