CloudSlam Day 1
7:48am PDT Ivan Casanova on cloud techniques for the corporate data center: keeps talking about “control”. Aargh. The “control” mantra was what caused mainframes to be outflanked by departmental minis, and departmental minis to be subverted by workgroup PC clusters. It’s all about the applications: an app owner is going to optimize locally, not globally. If the corporate IT function can offer resources which are easier to consume than traditional discrete boxes, then the app owners’ enlightened self-interest will lead to the desired change. (Business agility can always be used to justify a locally optimal but globally destructive choice.) So his “optimized for performance, cost, utilization” is wrong: it’s “optimized for ease of adoption”.
7:55am PDT By the way: this virtual conference thing is pretty frustrating. They’re using Webex, and while the slides display OK, audio is horribly choppy. Also the slide navigation features seem to be broken. I may dial into the parallel concall instead, just to get real audio.
8:43am PDT Michael Berman on cloud security. First surprise: he refers to the Open Group and its Jericho security initiative. Surprise, because I didn’t realize the Open Group was still in existence! Apart from this, the talk is a pretty good overview of the security issues for cloud computing. Little or no reference (so far) to identity; it seems to me that identity (federated or not) is key to any kind of cloud-level composition.
9:00am Mark Werrell on “cloud computing in a down economy”. Should be a popular topic. But pitching “cloud” as “the best of both worlds” – mainframe control, client/server flexibility – is a bit too simplistic. [9:45am] It was a generic cloud intro, few specifics related to the title. Oh well.
10:34am Songnian Zhou is talking about moving existing applications into clouds. Strange lack of mention of persistence and statelessness. He seems to assume that cloud infrastructure resources have all of the same characteristics as the pre-cloud resources, but this is unrealistic. Typically the kind of box that you use for a redundant Oracle setup is going to be different (higher quality, more IOPS) than what you use for a web tier app, or for a batch task. Repurposing boxes between these workloads doesn’t really work in a cost-effective manner. Most of the benefits of IaaS flow from reducing the heterogeneity of the hardware resources being virtualized. [10:53am] Useful examples of more-or-less cloudy corporate IT case studies.
11:01am My old friend and colleague Rob Gingell of Cassatt is about to talk…. And it’s a typical Rob talk: detailed, elegant, architecturally satisfying. However I’ve always been concerned that the Cassatt system is a bit too automated and holistic to make it accessible in a messy and ad hoc world. (The “Lotus Notes” of systems management, in a world of wikis, POP2 email, and PHP.) On the other hand, if people are really going to assemble heterogeneous private clouds, they’ll probably need powerful tools like this to achieve even close to optimum utilization. [...] 11:50am Rob just said that Cassatt’s experience is that heterogeneity is actually increasing, contra the predictions typically associated with IaaS and PaaS. This suggests an interesting tension/divergence between public and private clouds, because the economics of a public cloud (e.g. EC2) are driven by normalization. It also complicates the “on demand” argument for clouds. I still think that as cloud-optimized application patterns start to take hold, hardware diversity will tend to decrease: people will build boxes that are optimized for the virtualization patterns that they want to support.
1:05pm Dain Ehring on SaaS in banking. Dain came to Sun with Lighthouse before founding Dorado. SaaS for banks; in the present economic climate, banks can’t afford to do a lot of software engineering, but they have to comply with a ton of new regulations. Perfect climate for SaaS. Nice talk.
2:00pm Darren Plait, CTO of a Boulder cloud security startup called Symplified. Founded by a bunch of SAML gurus. Focus on IAM [identity and access management] in SaaS. (Unfortunately the slides are not advancing predictably… this WebEx stuff is not the best advertisement for SaaS!) They’re offering appliance and hosted IAM solutions; not sure how the appliance model works for a public-cloud-hosted customer. Symplified AMI?
3:12am Ugh! I started listening to a session by Francis Carden of Openspan on integrating cloud applications. And what do all these applications have in common? “They’re displayed on your desktop via the Windows operating system.” Oh, no they’re not!! FAIL. Or something like that.
And since I have another appointment at 4, that’s the end of the day for me. I think I like this kind of conference: no networking, it’s true, but excellent for multitasking. I hope the organizers sort out the minor technical glitches for the rest of the week.
