Date: 2009/11/11

Location: 105, 1st Art Building, Fuzhou University.

Topic: Cloud Computing Introduction

Supported by Gao Ang, Campus Ambassador of Chinese Academy of Sciences(CAS), we held a tech-talk about Grid Computing and Cloud Computing. Some postgraduate students and teachers, who researched this topic, attended this tech-talk.

Le mercredi 2 décembre à 11h00 - heure de Paris - Sun Starup Essentials vous invite à découvrir l'offre de Planet-Work, notre partenaire hébergement.

Frédéric Vannière, Directeur Technique, vous expliquera comment il a mis en oeuvre les fonctionnalités de virtualisation de Solaris et de ZFS pour proposer des packages d'hébergement souples, évolutifs et économiques. En route pour le Cloud Computing !

Inscrivez-vous !

Le mercredi 2 décembre à 11h00 - heure de Paris - Sun Starup Essentials vous invite à découvrir l'offre de Planet-Work, notre partenaire hébergement.

Frédéric Vannière, Directeur Technique, vous expliquera comment il a mis en oeuvre les fonctionnalités de virtualisation de Solaris et de ZFS pour proposer des packages d'hébergement souples, évolutifs et économiques. En route pour le Cloud Computing !
Inscrivez-vous !

A month after CloudCamp Munich took place, it is time to write a short summary.

1. I really liked the format of the unconference. Usually there are so many experts in the audience that it is a pity if you do not get their expertise as content into the agenda. With this format we had experts in the unpanel, with some vendors, some endusers, some open source proponents, and we had them in the working groups. This is a great advantage over standard conference formats.

2. If in Germany, one would think, that the audience is rather shy. No, they weren't. No problem to find the people for the unpanel. No problem to get good questions, and excellent participation in the working groups.

3. The only problem I saw - at least for some of us - was that topics presented got lost due to the highly packed content and agenda. So, I did not really follow the presentations of the working groups, as I was still preparing the results of my own. A note taker would help here.

4. I really liked the 5 minute presentations. In order to pitch your point, you can use slides, but only as  a nice background. I really liked the presentation by Phillipe Huber from Symetriq. He boiled it down to the point, and had very good pros and cons for clouds.

5. I had the pleasure to moderate the HA working group. We had a lively discussion whether there is or will be high availability in the cloud. I think the consensus at the end was, that

• looking at the prominent cloud offerings today, you get what you pay for; i.e. the default availability that is built into the cloud you are using. In order to get better resiliency, disaster recovery options, one would have to invest into using an alternate cloud as backup, implement monitoring and failover etc.
• but there is potential, i.e. a niche, for cloud offerings with higher availability, and DR built-in, etc. But that would be only available with a premium price. In order to attract customers with higher requirements this is probably the way to go.

6. Private Clouds. There was the interesting point made, that there are no private clouds. Why? Because you would have to invet upfront. Clouds are "pay-per-use" by definition. Ok!

If you see this as a hard requirement, then this is true. But, there will be all kinds of environments that fall somewhere in between the traditional data center and a real cloud. I see private clouds as a nice means, to benefit from the technical advantages of cloud computing, especially in large enterprises, where CAPEX is paid by someone else :-)

7. I usually try to shy away from discussing security. But I remember the quote that "Cloud security is less a technical than a process issue".

To summarize: "The Cloud will be the next level of the Internet!" Sorry, I forgot who made this statement.

Hartmut

PS: See you at CloudConf Stuttgart on 25Nov09.

Announcements have certainly accelerated lately with respect to integrated infrastructure technology.  Multiple vendors who provide infrastructure hardware for compute, storage and network are either partnering with each other or pursuing a "go alone" strategy.  Few will disagree that more tightly integrated solutions will benefit IT customers.

However an IT solution has always had the expectation and requirement to be integrated.  That is why the IT industry has developed over the years standards and protocols.  In other words, common industry accepted methods to move, process and protect business as well as consumer information.  Traditionally large complex IT solutions have been integrated by VARs, management consulting firms or consulting services for a given customer.  Is that beginning to change?  Also the IT solution is comprised of more than just tightly integrated hardware blocks. 

Let's not forget about the various applications that need to run on any given vendors hardware platform.  In addition to the applications, virtualization is becoming a standard requirement to maximize the utilization of any vendors integrated hardware platform.  Infrastructure providers will need to adjust to the fact that hypervisor technology may sell less hardware because utilization and efficiency will be largely improved.

Does this new focus on consolidation favor software stacks that are both heterogeneous and therefore ubiquitous?  The IT industry has become a mature business.  New ideas will always continue but IT will still be comprised of both hardware and software. 

A good analogy is the automobile industry...  Automobiles have had tremendous amounts of progress over the past 100 years.  For example there have been many optimizations and efficiencies with car manufacturing, car fuel efficiency, etc.  Over the past 20 years the automobile industry has highly leveraged the use of embedded electronics in cars.  But the basic components of a car (tires, engine, brakes, steering wheel, etc.) have (and for the foreseeable future) not changed.

Blog is available also at: http://bobporras.wordpress.com/

Harpreet 一直在为创建 Sun GlassFish Portfolio 的一些新的白皮书而努力。涉及的主题包括：Hudson、JBoss、WebSpace Server Cloud 及更多内容。 完整列表可从 GF Portfolio Resources 页面获取。另请参见 Sun.Com Resources 页获取白皮书及更多的跨所有 Sun 产品的白皮书。 所有白皮书均免费，但是需要注册。

Long time no post ! Shame on me....too busy understanding and solving customer challenges.

But today's AT&T SUN Press Release is justifying this post. After a lot of experts from Sun, AT&T and other companies designed the project, we conducted a 8 weeks proof of concept and architecture review in the Menlo Park Sun Solution Center this summer. Many thanks to Huon, Larry & Michael for their assistance ...More details on the AT&T Synaptic Services can be found here.

We are also working actively with other customers to leverage such gems as the Sun Cloud API , OpsCenter 2.5, VirtualBox and the fantastic & exciting Project Speedway.

Do not hesitate to contact me for more on those topics or to engage your local Sun Solution Center...

• Other governments are "Going Google," too - not just L.A. - The trend continues.
• AT&T plots compute cloud similar to Amazon Web Services - It is great to see an open API like Sun's Cloud Platform being used.
• GlassFish powers Egyptian seafood? - Entertaining at least, the power of the internet and a cool logo.

Bitkom Conference

Last week I had the chance to visit the annual Bitkom Outsouring Conference in Bad Homburg.

As I love to have a more aktive part in this kind of conferences....I was glad to be asked

to provide a not-so-technical view on  Cloud Computing in the Ousourcing space. 

How to do a presentation when everything is already said ?

For me, as you already know if you read my blog.....CC is not too much about technology, but

very much about business, business processing, compliance and legal requirements,

my background is only computer science an ecconomics......it was a great chance to

do this presentation together with Dr. Michael Rath  a real expert not only in Compliance

issues, SLA management, Outsourcing contracts but also on Intellectual Property and Copyright Law.

This is exactly the know how you need if you enter the cloud space. Probably not, if you life in

countries with no legal protection for individuals.

But as we are European residents we will see some regulatory impact:

• There are hundrets of rules that make significant influance to all your Cloud Computing plans
• These requirements will give easy Cloud Computing solutions some overhead
• This overhead will sometimes add a quite high amount of costs - reducing the CC benefit
• The compliance requirements will in some cases prevent the usage of CC, as legal requirements can not be met.
  

Next we agreed that the world does not need a next presentation on Cloud Computing definitions. We did in fact

give an overview on the trends and give some detailed recommendations.

.pdf Version of the workshop will be available here and announced in one of the next blog entries. Stay tuna.

Cloud Washing

Some of the work gets kinda hard
This ain't no place to be if you planned on bein' a star
Let me tell you it's always cool
And the boss don't mind sometimes if you act the fool

At the car wash
Whoa whoa whoa whoa
Talkin' about the car wash, girl

(Car Wash, Rose Royce, 1977)

That was the theme song of the first day at the Bitkom Outsourcing conference.

The main idea was to somehow wrap all already existing solutions and sell them

with a CC logo. So we leared that the IBM Lotus product is now Cloud Computing. Whoa whoa whoa.........

Reasons why you should no do Cloud Washing

1. Re-Branding is no innovation. Lotus is no CC, and a Mainframe is no open System. It is just marketing.
2. Your customer expect real innovations. Not only in technology, but also in the way services are packaged, offered and sold.
3. Customers like the fast moves and innovation cycles in CC.
4. Customers already know that a 3 year outsourcing contract is probably not a Cloud Computing Solution
5. If you cheat yourself.....you will miss a real market change and new chances for new, additional business.

How to start business in the Cloud Computing arena ?

1. Involve your legal department. Minimize risk. Follow legal/compliance rules. Call Dr. Rath.
2. If you plan to offer XaaS Services: Always include European Legal requirement in your solution.
3. Offer acceptable SLAs. You can kill your customers business with weak SLAs.
4. Don't kill customers
5. Offer always an acceptable exit plan. Keep your customers with service quality, not with ties.

And remember: There is always a higher risk if you outsource a process that is close to your strategic process (kernel process).

The eye of the storm....but this is a good tagline for the next blog entry. Tuna.

Looking for rock-solid web hosting at discounted rates? Talk to someone that understand startups

Joyent has a deal for Sun Startup Essentials program members with hosting services 25% off list price. Starting price is $16.59/month. No joke! 

To take advantage of the special pricing for Sun Startup Essentials startups, all you need is your Sun Startup Essentials ID #. Just click on the "Buy Now" button, and select the service(s) you're interested in purchasing. Find out more on the Joyent website.

Not a member yet? Sign up for Sun's startup program absolutely free at sun.com/startup.  And if for some reason you do not qualify for the Sun Startup Essentials program, don't worry. Joyent has several plans available that will suit you just fine.

And if you don't love Joyent and Sun Startup Essentials already, check out the free Facebook Developer Program. 

The biggest tendency in this moment is the “cloud computing”. This term was born by the fact that the computer is changing, today it's more difficult to see people buying super computers, it's more common people look for mobility and portability. This way, every thing will be in the internet. By the way, in few years we'll have space enough to store our files, photos, movies and music in the web space. Some services that you use are great examples, like Gmail and others services by Google. Probably, when you access your GMail count you are accessing a virtual server in the cloud zone.

See this picture below:

The picture show how a service in the Cloud works. Basically you access a Control Node which returns to you a virtual application from application server, as Photoshop or docs on the google page.

Some consequences of the cloud computing:

1. Computer's prices will get down because one computer to access the internet do not need a lot of resources, like large memories and graphics boards. A great example of this is the mobile phone. One cell phone doesn't have problems to access 3G network.

2. Systems Unix like OpenSolaris will be more important than others systems, once it's very easy to configure and run Systems Unix in web server to give support to cloud computing.

3. The internet price.

   You won't need to pay a lot of money to an internet service, because more and more people will need internet to use your desktop, once almost all your applications are in the internet. Perhaps this item 3 will take a long time to arrive in Brazil! By the way, will the Brazil be ready to support all the population connected in the same time?

Sun Microsystems has an application that offer support to cloud computing, called Virtual Box. Yes, virtualization is connected directly to cloud computing, once you need a system virtualized to create the cloud computing. More informations about VirtualBox can be found here

Credits: Tiago Scarton, Campus Ambassador at UNESP

É fácil se perder numa conversa sobre computação em nuvem. Todos parecem ter uma nuvem, estar conectados à nuvem, estar preparados para a nuvem ou, pelo menos, estar prontos para a nuvem.

Há vários jargões, mas nem tudo é papo furado. Por trás do jargão estão alguns negócios muito reais e benefícios tecnológicos.

Nosso novo guia de computação em nuvem te ajudará a separar o que é importante do que não é – e te armará com uma base para determinar se e como a computação em nuvem faz sentido para sua empresa.

Em 25 páginas, este guia gratuito:

   1. define computação em nuvem e seus benefícios
   2. explica os diferentes tipos de nuvem (pública, privada e híbrida)
   3. descreve as arquiteturas para as camadas de serviços (ex. Software as a Service)
   4. detalha as tecnologias de virtualização que estão por trás
   5. sugere os próximos passos e ações para dar o primeiro passo

Você também conhecerá a abordagem da Sun – que é entregar todos os componentes que empresas, desenvolvedores e usuários finais necessitam para ambientes de nuvem. Usando código aberto e padrões abertos, é claro. 

Acesse o guia – e coloque sua cabeça na nuvem: https://dct.sun.com/dct/forms/reg_br_2007_836_0.jsp

So, there you have it. Every CIO there is being tasked these days to potentially reduce costs and accelerate the time to market by incorporating this Mantra in their data center. Either by building in-house or by buying the service from an external vendor that offers these features to the user.

Its no news that Virtualization and Cloud Computing go together. Virtualization enables Cloud Computing, and in fact is one of the key under lying technology enabling the Cloud. However, often people are left wondering if Cloud Computing is no more than "Next-Gen Virtualization". In my mind, Yes and No, especially if you are talking about Private Clouds. I got motivated to write this piece to bring some clarity to this topic. 

A Cloud is virtualized by definition, but the degree of cloudiness depends on the level of automation and self service that is built into it. If the offering is a Public Cloud, then it must incorporate almost all principles of a Cloud Computing architecture that include multi-tenancy and pay-as-you-go model, enabled by a virtualized self-service platform with built-in services like billing, metering, charge back, along with public APIs or a Portal for public access to the Cloud. This is much more than an evolved virtualized environment, where you can quickly get a pre-deployed server or a service, ready to use, but does not necessarily have all these other built in services like self-service and pay-as-you go. In fact, a cloud service should be such that it can be abstracted for use on an as-need basis, and not just be a service that can be used over the internet.

In case of a Private Cloud, the users are more targeted and there is more leeway in how much of Cloud Computing principles are built into the infrastructure.  Infact, most enterprises are going with the incremental approach so as to leverage their existing legacy systems, yet begin to harvest the benefits of Cloud Computing. This is making Hybrid Clouds more popular where enterprises can spin off certain type of functional workloads or burst loads to an external Public Cloud. Several Public Cloud vendors are offering this feature where the customers can embed the compute nodes from the public cloud into the company VPN, hence making the public cloud nodes part of the company data center. While this architecture has some security concerns, given the public compute nodes in most cases are physically not separate from other nodes in the cloud, it being a virtualized environment, its still a good mid-way between an exclusive public cloud and a private cloud. Its worthwhile to mention here that there are companies like GoGrid and Rackspace who would offer dedicated hardware in their data centers to complement an enterprise private data center. However, the more dedicated the hardware, less are the cost and flexibility benefits of a cloud available to you.

The 9th Fallacy of Distributed Computing

While working recently with colleagues and customers to define and architect public and private "cloud computing" systems and to explore the technical challenges of implementing such systems, I was reminded of Peter Deutsch's observation in 1994 of the Seven Fallacies of Distributed Computing along with the Eight Fallacy added in 1996 by James Gosling:

1. The network is reliable.
2. Latency is zero.
3. Bandwidth is infinite.
4. The network is secure.
5. Topology doesn't change.
6. There is one administrator.
7. Transport cost is zero.
8. The network is homogeneous.

Although others have suggested additional fallacies, I think a critical cloud computing issue clearly suggests what the ninth one should be:

• 9. Location is irrelevant.

By suggesting this fallacy I mean the assumption that where computing happens and data resides is not an issue in today's massively connected global Internet. With sufficient connectivity and bandwidth, you might assume that outsourcing your computing services, possibly even outside your home country, is simply a matter of economics. This is clearly false. While end users of public cloud based applications may not be aware that or even care that their computation is occurring on some randomly and dynamically assigned set of virtualized servers which may change even as they use them, nor be concerned about precisely what storage devices are dynamically assigned to host their data, nevertheless these resources do indeed have physical presences which tie them to specific locations that have geographic and jurisdictional characteristics.

The overall stability and reliability of a cloud provider data center depends in part on its geographic location - its proximity to sufficient power and cooling resources, and its safety from natural and man-made disasters. That's why Google has built data centers close to power generating facilities and why Switch Communications built its huge SuperNAP center in geologically stable and meteorologically quiet Las Vegas.

But even more critical than physical location is the legal jurisdiction in which your computation occurs and where your data resides. Laws governing privacy, data ownership, intellectual property, monitoring, and auditing vary from state to state in the US and globally from one country to another. And pinning down the exact location of a global distributed IT service is difficult. In the event of legal disputes over liability or disclosure issues, where will cases be tried? Many such jurisdictional questions remain unanswered, and some countries are reacting with understandable caution about sharing global computing resources. Canada, for example, has prohibited the use of US data centers for certain government projects due to concerns about the provisions of the US Patriot Act, and India is considering legislation requiring IT business services to originate within the country.

So, if you haven't already frightened yourself examining the myriad cloud security issues, google for "cloud computing" with "jurisdiction" for some additional reading material. You'll find that, as with real estate, location is anything but irrelevant.

---

Some references:

Cloud Computing Brings New Legal Challenges
The Determination of Jurisdiction in Grid and Cloud Service Level Agreements
Legal Implications of Cloud Computing
The Boundaries of Cloud Computing: World, Nation or Jurisdiction?

It has been almost two years since the divas were split up -- Gail works on JavaFX and I work on Cloud Services. I have been thinking about starting a new blog ever since, and I finally got around to doing it. From now on, I will be posting at altocirrus.wordpress.com. In addition to talking about NetBeans, Ruby, and Rails, I will be getting into cloud applications and other bits of cloud information that I come across.

- diva#2

With a variety of public cloud hosting solutions available in the market such as Amazon, Rackspace and GoGrid and private solutions like Eucalyptus, Terremark, and VMWare, Right Scale offers a cloud management platform that operates on most of them. Using Right Scale's platform, you don't need to write scripts to launch EC2 instances, or think about plugging your own monitoring / management mechanisms for health check, or worry about lock-in to a particular cloud provider. Ease-of-use and a faster on-ramp for going production on a cloud are other key reasons amongst several other benefits offered by Right Scale.

Right Scale's mantra "Real customers, Real deployments, Real benefits" was truly evident in their first ever user meetup. Other than discussing the trends, product road map and services offered by Right Scale, the most interesting part was the customer testimonials.

Greg Taylor from Sony Music uses Right Scale to manage it's artists fan sites. Their main reasons for using Right Scale are largest choice of Operating System & AMI, multiple redundant data center reduce risk, and server templates/scripts versioning into portal. They are very happy with MySQL master/slave configuration server templates and have been able to scale to millions of users in a day (e.g. with michaeljackson.com). Michael Dosik from FanSnap (ticket search engine) leverage RightScale for automation instead of adding staff. Auto-scaling, RightScripts, Dashboard/monitoring and ease-of-use are other features specific that brings them to RightScale. Sam Ramji from Sonoa Systems (visibility, management, and control for Cloud services) talked about cutting down their configuration time from 3-4 days on EC2 to hours on RightScale platform and reduced concerns around portability as the main reasons for picking this platform. Read a more complete report about the meetup here.

Here are some other data points ...

• Scalable Web Sites, Test & Dev, Business Intelligence, Backup & Recovery, Mobile Services, and Grid Computing are the highest usage areas by Right Scale users
• Fast on-ramp, Ease of setup, Ease of maintenance, IT visibility & control, Retain best practices, Productivity, Agility, Reliability, Predictability, and Portability are are some of the key benefits to Right Scale users.
• 100% production usage on EC2 for now
• Ubuntu 9.10, CentOS 5.4, Windows 2003, Windows 2008 support coming (Ubuntu 8.04 used internally)
• RHEL is the most often requested platform
• Chef integration is the future direction, most new features like Machine Tags are targeted at Chef only
• Right Scale's CEO recommended to use the free version for 2 servers and the commercial version for 6-8+ servers
• Monitoring features: monit integration, CPU/Disk/Network/MySQL/Apache/others, Auto-scaling based on alerts, 7-day free monitoring

The meetup very much lived to it's promise of "NO! HYPE" buttons which were distributed to all the attendees. Each attendee was given a tee-shirt which had "707,007+" printed in big letters in the front. This is the number of servers launched by Right Scale so far. The "NO! HYPE" promise became much more evident after attending some sessions at SYS-CON Cloud Computing Expo which were still talking about philosophies / theories. The cocktail party in the evening provided a great atmosphere to mingle with the folks behind Right Scale.

So far no pictures from the meetup are available on flickr but hopefully they will show up here.

Over all, I really enjoyed the presentations at the meetup, meeting the Right Scale folks, and food/drinks at the cocktail party :-)

Technorati: rightscale cloud meetup

Just in time for the OpenSolaris Developer Conference, we were able to publish new Immutable Service Containers images directly to the Amazon Web Services Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) environment. Previously, I talked about creating ISCs using our security enhanced OpenSolaris 2009.06 AMIs. Today, I am happy to announce that we have taken the next logical step by making available AMIs that fully incorporate the ISC changes. If you want to try out this configuration, simply provision an Immutable Service Containers AMI on EC2. We have made AMIs available in both the U.S. (ami-48c32021) and European (ami-78567d0c) regions. As always, we would love to get your feedback on these images and what you would like to see next!

Take care!

Technorati Tag: OpenSolaris security cloudcomputing virtualization auditing hardening amazon aws ec2

Just wanted to let everyone know of a new Immutable Service Containers technical presentation (ODF, PDF) that has been posted. This version was delivered last week in Dresden, Germany at the OpenSolaris Developer Conference. This presentation has all of the latest and greatest information particularly on the OpenSolaris ISC Construction Kit. As always, I would love to hear your comments and feedback!

Take care!

Technorati Tag: OpenSolaris security cloudcomputing virtualization auditing hardening osdevcon

HarpreetがSun GlassFish Portfolioのための様々な新しいホワイトペーパーを作成しました。 トピックはHudson、JBoss、WebSpace Server、Cloud など多岐にわたります。 完全なリストはGF Portfolio資料ページから参照可能です。 ホワイトペーパーの他、サン製品全てのためのSun.Com資料ページもご一読下さい。 全てのホワイトペーパーは無料ですが、登録が必要となります。

The Sun Identity team will be actively participating in the Internet Identity WorkShop next week in Palo Alto. We're looking forward to talking about hot new technologies such as OAUTH and Vendor Relationship Management and hope to actively share our ideas around innovation in the identity and access management space. We just signed up as a sponsor (better late than never) and will be providing lunch on one of the days. Hope to see you there!

Cloud Computing is a hype topic, most of you know that. Still there is a lot of interesting stuff going on during the past months and weeks. As one of the chairs of the OCCI (http://www.occi-wg.org) working group I had the great opportunity to present the status and some cloud related work during the Cloud Computing and its Applications conference. I was invited by Ian Foster to present the following slides:

What it comes done to is the following: During OGF27 (http://www.ogf.org/OGF27) we stated to present one of the first standardized Cloud interfaces. We are almost there and soon the specification will be out in the public comments phase of the OGF editor pipeline. More important than having one standard is to have the standards collaborate while each focus on a different aspect. For example the Cloud Data Management Interface driven by SNIA (http://www.snia.org). Now we need some more efforts like demos demonstrating interoperable and portable cloud solutions.

If you wanna know what is going on for OCCI right now: We had a lot of blog posts, mails, etc going on...

BTW the OCCI sessions during OGF27 itself went pretty well and both OCCI and myself have been in the closing remarks from Craig Lee:

We all know and have read that Oracle and particularly Larry and the Cloud Computing hype have been somewhat at odds.  Some examples:

• Larry dismissing it as the latest fashion in an industry more fashion-driven than women's fashion.
• Redefining cloud computing to including everything that we (Oracle) already do. 
• Dismissing  it as vapor  during a recent Churchill Club appearance.

Undoubtedly there are several other assertions to this effect. Granted, Larry doesnt seem to like the term. And many of Cloud Computing's avid followers do admit that he has a point. Yes, googling for Ellison+Cloud+Computing yields millions of hits.

Does this mean Oracle refuses to do Cloud Computing? Not at all. Follow the money trail instead. Google for Oracle+Cloud+Computing and you can see a very different picture. I was impressed by the prominent presence of On-Demand versions of all Oracle products at the OOW DEMOgrounds. Virtually, all products (at least ones I know about) had On-Demand versions on display. And talking to various product managers reinforced this feeling. Oracle may be influenced by Larry's disdain for the Cloud Hype and Hyperbole, but it is run by how much money is on the table. As it should be. And in this regard, it has plenty to offer. Consider these broad references:

• Oracle Cloud Computing Center and FAQ and wiki
• Architectural Strategies for Cloud Computing (PDF preso)
• Oracle's partnership with Amazon and presence on EC2

Oracle had a preso at the recently concluded Oracle OpenWorld where the presenters outlined Oracle's On-Demand portfolio, "including Oracle's cloud, software as a service (SaaS), and on-demand vision to outline how customers can use unparalleled flexibility to their advantage in the purchase, deployment, support, hosting, and managing of their Oracle solutions" (words from their abstract). It makes for an interesting reading (requires membership or fees to access). Moreover, Salesforce.com had a HUGE and prominent presence in Moscone West.

My conclusion: forget the hype and the bluster surrounding Larry and Cloud computing. Focus on where Oracle is delivering products, datacenter services and a very flexible set of offerings. My guess from reading Oracle's 10K is that it makes a ton of money (in the hundreds of millions of dollars) on it and expects this trend to grow. So, expect more from Oracle, not less, in this regard. The company knows there is plenty of money to be made by showing leadership in this domain and it isnt going to ignore such a juicy opportunity.

Leia os mais recentes WhitePapers do Sun GlassFish Portfolio. Os tópicos incluem: Hudson, JBoss, WebSpace Server Cloud e muito mais. A lista completa está disponível na página de Recursos do GF Portfolio . Veja também a página de diversos tipo de whitepapers no Sun.Com Resources. Todos os documentos técnicos são gratuitos.

Harpreet has been driving the creation of a Several New WhitePapers for the Sun GlassFish Portfolio. Topics covered include: Hudson, JBoss, WebSpace Server Cloud and many more. A full list is available from the GF Portfolio Resources page. Also see the Sun.Com Resources page for whitepapers and more across all of Sun's products. All whitepapers are free but registration is required.

• Street View: We can trike wherever you like - Trail view?  River view?  Someday, house view?  Send your suggestions in.
• T-Mobile Data Loss Falsely Reflects on Cloud Computing - "We need to stop calling everything that does not exist within our firewalls 'the cloud.'"  Well said.
• EU's MySQL inquiry may backfire for open source - Well written article, but is MySQL an exception or will what the EU is doing become the new rule?

Next week there will be the ICT Security Forum at Rome, and I'm preparing a speech for this event about "Identity in the Cloud: what's next trust level", where I'm going to talk about how the new paradigms as Web 2.0, Software as a Service (SaaS) and cloud computing have introduced new needs related the security and the privacy of the information and how digital identity is critical and success factor to manage authentication and authorization complexity in a distributed environment, and what kind of level of assurance can be reached.

With the prospective to give to the audience an harmonized unique graphic view of the most important open identity standard technologies, I've created a Cube.

The idea to use a Cube as representation of open Identity technologies was borne when I've studied the Venn of Identity with the goal to introduce OAuth protocol in the Venn graph. Discussing with Eve Maler about this opportunity, she suggested the need to separate the front-channel from back-channel, she also mentioned that she hadn't found a way to combine OAuth with the original Venn in a way she was happy, as you can see in the her recently publishing a Venn of Identity in web Service. I thought, this can be reachable with the front-face and back-face of a Cube!!  

As you can see in the above cube picture, each front-face have a corresponding back-face (i.e. OpenID->OAuth, SAML->Id-WSF, InfoCard->WS-*) or if you rotate (imagine) the cube you can have different prospectives (inter-enterprise/SaaS, consumer, ect.).  There are also some other interesting aspects as adjacent property, related to create an hybrid system (See bootstrapping the Identity metasystem), that is, combining or chaining systems and enabling transaction between them (i.e SAML -> OpenID, InfoCard -> ID-WSF, SAML->OAuth). Is this a magic cube of Identity? Comment it ;)

These models/systems could open interesting opportunity for the Italian National Centre for IT in Public Administration (CNIPA) which is involved in defining a National Federated Identity Management system based on SAML2.0, implementing a user-centric mechanism used to authorize and control the access to application services over SPCoop (Public Cooperative System). 

During my summer vacation, and driven by the fact, that Oracle is acquiring Sun, I had been spending thoughts on the state of the IT industry lately.

Then last week, some colleagues forwarded a link to a fake interview with Bjarne Stroustrup on the invention of C++ and the drivers behind it. This interview now triggered my intent to write down some thoughts and publish them for discussion.

Additionally the new hype word "Cloud" made me want to add some comments to that as well. Specifically, as my possible new boss, Larry Ellison calls it "vapor water".

So, let's start with some basic facts, that I think, are important to understand what I'm trying to explain:

• Moore's Law
• Software needs

The first point I guess needs no further commenting. Still the second point needs it. I did not perform a precise analysis, but it seems obvious (discussion point one!) that the needs that software versions add to the previous version are now outpaced by Moore's Law. Will say: Hardware gets faster quicker, then software needs grow. One simple proof for that is the fact, that most servers in datacenters nowadays are utilized only around or below 15%, and another important proof is the rapid uptake of virtualization techniques.

As a sideeffect of this rapid growth in compute power, many companies have gone out of business or are close to getting out of business. Think DEC, Data General, Compaq, SGI, Cray, Apollo Computer and others like these. Now Sun Microsystems also will become history.

The question behind this all simply is: Why?

In order to start an answer, I will first deviate a bit...

In September 1990 there was a famous 15 year anniversary edition titled "Byte Magazine 15th anniversary summit, setting the standards" of the Byte magazine, which did try to shade an outlook into the next 15 years of the computer industry and its development by asking the 63 most influential people of the time to look back and from that predict the future. Sadly, Byte was torn down in 1998, and although it did continue as a web-presence for some years, it is no longer available, and had been removed from the web in February 2009. So also the link above no longer works.

A link to the table of contents of that edition at least can be found here. The cover page is here. And some of the predictions published in that issue can be found here (that page calls it a brief excerpt, sadly I dumped all my paper versions of Byte approx. 10 years ago into the bin in the hope of it being online forever. How naive, wrong and mistaken have I been... ;-( ) (discussion point two) (and: btw: I'd like to get a copy, if anyone can spare his/hers).

In that discussion, many diverse topics had been approached, and had been answered by many but not all of the 63 people. One of those was Donald Knuth, creator of the programming language Pascal. He is cited with:

Donald Knuth: ...computers are going to double in speed every year until 1995, and then they're going to run out of ideas.

How wrong has he been...

And as a proof point to my second topic above, I'd like to quote Mr Kernighan, inventor of the famous programming language C:

What about the software side of the equation? Or are all the changes coming in hardware?

Brian Kernighan: Software, unfortunately, is not nearly as easy to make go better as hardware seems to be. And the software will not get better fast enough, and so you'll piddle away more and more of [the power] on stuff that doesn't quite work the way you want it to....

And then there was the question:

What is the biggest obstacle to major new breakthroughs in computing?

In a word, software, not hardware.

Suffice it to say, that I assume these predictions from close to 20 years ago a valid proof point for my thesis, that software didn't grew and doesn't grow in demand as quickly as the hardware grew and still grows in speed and capabilities.

After this short deviation into the past using a look into the most important publication of that era back to the question on why the IT industry is in the state that it is in today.

It seems obvious, that some (shall I say: many?) have miscalculated the differences in development speed between software and hardware. Or assumed, that the overall demand for compute power might still ramp up and make up for the growth in produced CPU capacities to still be able to sell as much (in Dollars) as before (that would have required to sell way more units then before). It did work for quite a while during the gold-rush era of the early 21st century and the dot-com bubble, where many new enterprise were created that used the internet and needed CPUs like crazy. But it also seems obvious from this fact, that hardware is becoming more and more of a commodity, because the average cost per CPU-cylce needed to solve a specific problem goes down and down. My favorite statement here is, which I use often in virtualization talks, and now in cloud talks: "Take your mobile phone out of your pocket, look at it, and remember: NASA had LESS CPU power (in total) to savely bring mankind to the moon and back compared to what you look at right now."

That then sets the stage for open and candid discussions on the state of virtualization, cloud computing et. al. But, again, more on that later.

Matthias

안녕하세요?
오늘 코엑스에서 열린 Advanced Computing Conference 2009 행사에 다녀왔는데요, 노트했던 내용을 공유합니다.

Advanced Computing Conference 2009
일시 : 2009년 10월 13일

세션 1. EMC

- VCE : Cloud Computing을 위한 전략적 제휴 (패키지)
- VCE = VMware + Cisco + EMC

(1) VMware
    역할
    - Cloud O/S : vSphere
    - Centralized management : VMWare View, vCenter (Provisioning, Configuration)
(2) Cisco
    역할 : Internetwork, Unified Computing
    Switch, Plugins
    제품 : Nexus 1000V
(3) EMC
    역할 : Virtual Information Infrastructure
    특징 : FAST (Fully Automated Storage Tiering) : Flash + FC + SATA 하이브리드 티어 구성

세션 2. VMWare : vCloud Initiate

- ITaaS 구현의 고려 사항 : Efficiency, Control, Choice
- 가상화 단계 : Server Virtualization -> Distributed Virtualization -> Private Cloud -> Hybrid Cloud
- 제품 : vSphere Foundation (Cloud O/S)
- VMware가 보는 클라우드의 정의
    Resource on demand
    Pay for what you use
    Accessible as a loosely-coupled service
    Scalable and Elastic
    Improved economics due to shared infrastructrure and elasticity

세션 3. 클라우트 컴퓨팅과 IDC사업자 (KT)

- IDC 패러다임의 진화
(1) AC -> DC
    예 : 로렌스버클리, 미국 Google, KT
    KT 효과 : 운영비용 65% 절감, 전력 안정도 20배 향상, 에너지 비용 25% 절약, 공간 70% 감소
(2) 고객 자체 구축 -> 유틸리티 컴퓨팅
    적용 기술 : 가상화, 분산처리, 미터링, 표준화

세션 4. K-Cloud (방송통신위)

- 현재 추진 계획 중 (범부처 민-관 합동 K-클라우드 협의회 예정)
    방통위 + 지경부 : Testbed 구축 추진
    방통위 + 행안부 : 공공의 개방형 클라우드 전략 수립
- 추진 전략 : 미니클라우드 서비스, 클라우드 서비스 생태계 구축, 기반 조성

세션 5. NetApp

- 클라우드 컴퓨팅 소개
    Cloud : ITaaS
    Cloud Computing : A business model for ITaaS
    Type of C/C : Private, Public
    Provider : Amazon S3, Iron Mountain, Yahoo, Salesforce.com, Google, EMC Mozy, Daum, NHN
    Enabler : Citrix, EMC, IBM, MS, NetAPP, VMware
- 제품
    Data ONTAP  
    MultiStore
    Data Motion
    VMware + Cisco + NetApp

세션 6. Google

- Amazon : PaaS + IaaS
- Google, MS : PaaS, SaaS
- Cloud for Google
    (1) Google Apps (SaaS Leader)
    (2) App Engine (SaaS Enabler)
        Google Apps offline
        Chrome Frame : Free Plug-in for IE (www.google.com/chromeframe)

세션 7. MS

- 클라우드컴퓨팅의 정의가 동상이몽 : 글로벌 벤더별 사업 전략에 따라 가치해석, 적용기술, 제품군에 따라 현격한 차이
- Private Cloud와 Public Cloud 모두에 대한 전략을 가진 공급자는 MS와 Sun뿐이다.
- MS의 전략 : 현재 사용중인 기술 활용, C#, PHP, Java, Ruby, Python, etc. (진입장벽 제거)

- (제품) MS Azure
    클라우드를 위한 운영체제
    하드웨어로부터 추상화되어 있는 애플리케이션 실행 환경
    접근 통제 기능을 가진 공유파일시스템
    공유 풀을 이용한 자원 할당
    타 시스템과의 상호 호환성
- 인프라 클라우드 + 플랫폼 클라우드
- 개발자는 하드웨어에 대한 복잡한 제어를 직접할 필요가 없음

- MS의 클라우드 플랫폼
    Windows Azure : Compute + Storage + Management
    SQL Azure : Relational data + Management
    .NET services : Connectivity + Interoperability + Access Control

전반적으로 세미나 일정은 알차게 구성된 것 같은데, 아쉬운 점이 있다면 30분씩 짧은 발표마다 다들 비슷비슷한 서론(클라우드 정의 관련)이 반복되고 정작 자기 Topic은 제품 이름 소개 정도의 overview로 끝나는 것 같았습니다..

Please note:

For approximately 30 minutes on Tuesday, October 13th between 9:00 and 9:30PM Pacific Standard Time, kenai.com/jira will not be accessible while we make upgrades.

We apologize for any inconveniences this may cause users.

If you encounter any issues after 9:30PM please inform us by sending e-mail to kenai-admin<at>sun<dot>com.

- The Project Kenai Team