No Huddle Offense

The Cloud & Standards collaboration

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:

Categories: Work • Tags: Cloud, OCCI, OGF • Permalink for this article

For Your Cloud Poster

So happy to see the poster I made at the Sun HPC workshop:

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Open Cloud Framework – Open Standards for the Cloud Community

Here is the talk I gave at GridKa School 2009 in Karlsruhe. Recordings will follow later – so stay tuned. The slides itself might not be to easy to read because they are designed for presentation not for Offline usage. But you’ll find a short transcript below…

1. Introduction slide
2. A very simple quote showing that not many people know what Cloud Computing is. Simon Wardley – found 68 definitions at his OSCON presentation.
3. So what is cloud computing – cartoon shows that it is unclear and that Cloud Computing is not when you take an existing product and add a ‘Cloud Computing’ stamp on it. But these slides will define Cloud Computing using the RESERVOIR project acronym. The cartoon although is funny – the first line shows that adding public resources to your Private Cloud will create a big cloud. The second line shows that if you deinstall all software you will get Sun hardware 🙂 The third shows that if you have problem with your Cloud Sun will fix it.
4. Intro to the FP7 EU Project RESERVOIR
5. RESERVOIR stands for Resources and Services Virtualization without Barriers. So the 3 components are Resources, Services and Virtualization. If you combine them all without barriers you get Cloud Computing.
6. Resources can be one of these nice Sun Blade Centers
7. Services are any kind of Software with a demand for Services. The last think is important. Without the demand no Cloud. Next to that a Service has an Interface towards the End-user a Description consisting of Meta-information for the Semantic Cloud as well as requirements like CPU speed and architecture. Also a Service needs to have a SLA bound to it.
8. Virtualization is basically an abstraction. And possible for Hardware (VirtualBox, VmWare,…), Software (Java), Storage (OGSA-DAI) or Network (Sun Crossbow).
9. A lot of barriers need to dealt with.
10. Sun doesn’t do this alone but with these RESERVOIR Project partners.
11. Still what is Cloud Computing? This picture shows that it is everything and a kitchen sink. It is a lot and therefore we need more clarification based on Classification.
12. The 3 major things which can be provided as a Service towards the customer are Software, Infrastructure and Platform as a Service. Important is that this is not a layered approach because you could offer SaaS on top of IaaS without PaaS…
13. Several patterns of how users use the Cloud also show that Cloud Computing isn’t easy to describe
14. The diversity also adds more confusion
15. But one major thing of the Cloud is that you can do migration, consolidation and Hybrid-Clouds – so to say beeing elastic
16. The RESERVOIR layered architecture
17. Demoing the features fo such an environment – things Sun has demonstrated
18. The Virtual Java Service Container is a unique entry point for all kind of Java Services. Those can be deployed and then managed/scaled in the environment
19. The Exeds of a SGE cluster can be started and shutdown on demand.
20. But the ‘blue arrows on slide #16 show that all this (elasticity, management etc.) is not possible without Standards. One is OGFs Open Cloud Computing Interface.
21. A nice quote about standardization – design it to be extensible and think about the future
22. It has 3 main drivers: Interoperability
23. Portability
24. Integration
25. Focus on IaaS/virtual workloads
26. If you have a lot of people you will have also some great minds onboard who can help
27. 190 Members and a lot of active members/implementors and chairs are helping out
28. The timeline to create a slim, extensbile API for the Cloud (And one of the first!) by OGF27
29. The two devliverables of the OCCI working group
30. The CRUD operations and mapping towards HTTP operations
31. A diagram of OCCI. Maybe to complex to explain in text. Join the group or listen to one of the future talks about OCCI 🙂
32. The most important slide. Having only one standard doesn’t help. It helps having one interface to ‘combine’ Clouds but what happens with e.g. secure data (top left)? So there is a demand for other standards. Those are shown in the big Cloud. More are also there. So please: join and help those groups! Without these the Cloud will not be possible (think of the barriers and elasticity)
33. If it doesn’t happen Mankind will also die off…
34. References and questions

Categories: Personal, Work • Tags: Cloud, OCCI, OGF, Standards • Permalink for this article

How NOT to define Cloud Computing

Take your current product and sell it as ‘the Cloud’…:-)

Categories: Personal • Tags: Cloud • Permalink for this article

Quotes and pictures about the Cloud

For an upcoming presentation about OCCI and RESERVOIR I was looking for some nice quotes and pictures I could use. The quotes and pictures should be in relation to Cloud Computing and OCCI. My favorite quote (I’m using several in the presentation) would be from Henry Ford:

“If you think of standardization as the best that you know today, but which is to be improved tomorrow; you get somewhere.”

The picture I liked most was taken from http://infreemation.net/cloud-computing-linear-utility-or-complex-ecosystem/ – It shows what Cloud Computing is: everything and a kitchen sink:

I’ll share the presentation as soon as the GridKa School event is over.

Categories: Personal • Tags: Cloud, OCCI • Permalink for this article