Mastering The Cloud

I was lucky enough to catch a lecture by Vinton Cerf, Vice President and Chief Internet Evangelist at Google, yesterday at RIT. He was a very energetic speaker and I enjoyed his talk very much. Below are some of the highlights:

• “IP version 4 only has a 32 bit address space and that is my fault.”
• Dr. Cerf wants our mobile phones to be viewed as controllers to all devices around us that will eventually be on the internet (home stereo, lights, projectors, etc.)
• Dr. Cerf uses Arch Rock products in his home to monitor temperature and humidity in every room of his house.
• There are multiple cloud vendors/networks available today however they are all different and have different interfaces. He views this the same as how in the days of the ArpaNet when networks were different and he helped to create TCP/IP and gateways and therefore believes it is an excellent area for research today.
• Bit Rot was stated to be another huge problem that we will face in future years and generations

I was also lucky enough to be able to ask a question to Dr. Cerf directly in the Q&A part of the lecture. My question was how to innovate and create a common interface between the cloud platforms when the internet has become so commercialized as opposed to back when Dr. Cerf worked on the ArpaNet and it was basically a military experiment. His response was that in academia the comercial and political boundaries are not always present and leveraging organic growth and the open source community support is the best way to accomplish the task.

If Dr. Cerf comes to a institution near your area, I highly suggest hearing him speak.

The Cloud Computing Expo was quite the event and extremely tiring. Long days and lots of knowledge was shared. Below are some highlights from my notes and experiences.

Werner Vogel (Amazon)

• Back in 2001 Amazon.com engineers joked that Amazon.com systems were built with WD40 and Duct Tape
• “We quickly learned databases don’t scale”
• With each user request to Amazon.com, approximately 200-300 internal services are hit
• Each service has a development team and that team is responsible for everything with that service, including deployment and operations
• Wanted services to be tools not frameworks, and therefore be free standing so a customer can use S3 without needing to use any other AWS
• Stax allows enterprises to take existing J2EE apps run directly in AWS

Dave Douglas (Sun)

• Dave had a great presentation, he opened with a top 10 list of “Things You Didn’t Know About Cloud Computing” of which I would like to highlight three:
  1) Al Gore invented cloud computing in 1989
  2) Amazon only has three customers: Animoto, SmugMug, and the NY Times
  3) IBM blank blank Cloud Computing blank blank JCL blank blank fully punch card compatible
• Sun Cloud will be open summer 2009
• Dave showed a prototype UI for assembling services in the cloud. Concept is you want a scalable/reliable database, no need to set it up and configure it, just drag a DB icon into your diagram.
• The Sun Cloud API is definitely worth checking it out. It is a REST / JSON API licensed under Creative Commons and some cool new attributes like being completely self discovering after initial request
• OpenOffice will soon have a “Save to Cloud…” option. The goal Sun has is to bring the notion of the cloud up to the end user level.

Reuven Cohen (Enomaly)

• Reuven gave a brief overview Enomaly and his involvement with cloud computing
• Talked about how in the talks he had with the various players in the industry during forming the Cloud Manifesto, companies did not want to be open in their discussions; hence the core problem.
• The majority of his session was open discussion by everyone there and it was proposed that a Customer Council was needed to a unified voice of the community can be presented.
• I found this session to be quite enjoyable due to the open discussion nature and hearing everyone’s remarks

Doug Tidwell (IBM)

• Doug is an amazing presenter with amazing technical talent, but can keep a room laughing
• Doug presented on Service Component Architecture (SCA) and used Tuscany to illustrate it
• As software is developed to run in the cloud and use cloud services, using SCA is more important than ever
• Doug had a twitter feed up during his presentation and encouraged the audience to leave tweets and he checked it throughout the presentation. It was quite interesting.

Other items and areas that are worth mentioning:

• Majority of folks representing large enterprises are still waiting for the following two items before moving to the cloud
  1) Better security and certifications
  2) Ability to run 50% in one cloud and 50% in another cloud so they can handle disaster situations where one cloud experiences trouble or goes bankrupt
• We have reached the peak of hype with cloud computing and are now in a disillusionment stage
• RightScale is working on integration with Eucalyptus and will be announcing full details and services end of April!
• When in the cloud, software load balancers are really your only option and therefore become crucial, as hardware load balancers are not an option. Zeus was there touting their products.
• Microsoft’s Azure Services Platform looks very impressive. I am looking forward to digging into it deeper and hopefully breaking it down on here.