Utility Computing aka Cloud Computing: June 2008

Monday, June 23, 2008

Re: More with Moore, more or less

Reuven,

I understand what you are saying, but I fear I must respectfully
disagree. In fact, I think you have it precisely backwards -- unless,
perhaps, you are specifically talking about Enomaly, as opposed to
cloud computing in general.

Moore's law is about larger numbers of transistors per device, per
system. Cloud computing, like clusters, farms, and grids, is about
using multiple systems. A key example is Google. As Paco's excellent
reference to "behind the scenes" at Google pointed out, Google is all
about using low-end systems. LOTS of low-end systems. Not the high-end
systems that are at any time the current best expression of Moore's
law. "Single machine performance is not interesting" (p. 4). I've seen
no indication they're the sligntest bit interested in virtualization.

While cloud computing can *use* virtualization to pack more separate
systems into a smaller volume (with lower power, etc.), it is the
virtualization alone that exploits more processors per chip, more bits
per RAM DIP, etc.

Enomaly's implementation may tame the management of virtualization,
making it simpler to use. But taming, or eliminating, or outsourcing
management of many systems is a significant part of cloud computing --
whether those systems are virtual or not.

(Postscript -- other issues: (1) It seems to me that you are
implicitly equating "number of transistors" and "performance." There
used to be a direct relationship between them, but no longer. Big
subject. (2) Intel is by far not the only company "driven" by Moore's
Law. Everybody in the computing industry has been, and is. Clusterers/
farmers/cloudies, however, are far less so because of the multi-system
aspect.)

--
Greg Pfister

Re: Top 5 computes at Google?

On Mon, Jun 23, 2008 at 10:07 AM, Theodore Omtzigt wrote:

Khazret:

We should be able to do this from first principals: 0.25s and let's say they use 4000 servers. I think the size of the index server banks is large since they benefit from having the whole index in memory. Whole index in memory + redundancy + 1000s queries per sec indicates a large cluster for this (I was trying to dig up info on the size of the index but can't find it right now so it is a bit of a shot from the hip).

0.25s on 4000 servers
1 index server is 400Watts given that these have large memory configs and fastish cpus
assume the network takes about 1/4 of the power of the cluster it serves

so approximate the query consumes of the order of 500kJoules. Let's see if we can put this in perspective: A hair dryer is about 1500Watts: so the query takes as much energy as running the hair dryer for 5.5 minutes. Please double check my math.

Theo

If we take your numbers as starting point, then extrapolation gives us following energy consumption for September 2007:

500 kilojoules is about 138.88 watt-hour, so 2,217,000 jobs/month gives 307.89696 megawatt-hour,

which equals about 205,264.64 of pretty American women standing in front of mirror with hairdryer. :)

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Re: Business Intelligence solution in Cloud Computing

Tons of useful information in this thread...thank you all...

Typically the ETL maps/jobs needs a fixed source table/file structure so that it can read from that and move data to the target dimensional model. So, the customer has to download data from their environment to a format recommended by saas vendor, which would then be consumed by the ETL tool and transformed to the star model.

What if the customer doesn't have the bandwidth/resources to create extraction routines that would create data in the recommended format?

Wouldnt' that be a huge challenge for the saas vendor because they have to now convert and load all these disparate formats of data into one stage area model and then eventually load the star model.

Anyone resolved this issue before?

Ramesh.

Re: Issues of data in the cloud...

The analogies of electricity and cash to cloud computing both ignore
the fact that there is no information in electricity or cash.

Re: Issues of data in the cloud...

Some people call that DRM!

Pratap

Re: Issues of data in the cloud...

On Jun 23, 2008, at 11:56 AM, Ray Nugent wrote:

Big Businesses don't keep all their cash in a safe in the basement at HQ, they use banks. Why do they need to keep their data on servers in the HQ data center rather than a secured third party repository?

Great analogy Ray. I think the "problem" for data on the cloud may lie in the word choice. Clouds evoke floaty puffy images. Banks (supposedly_) do not, although we've had many banks that were both floaty and puffy in the recent past.

Timothy Huber

Strategic Account Development

tim.huber@metaram.com

cell 310 795.6599

MetaRAM Inc.

181 Metro Drive, Suite 400

San Jose, CA 95110

Re: Issues of data in the cloud...

A mistake is to assume encrypting data makes it secure. While it can't
be read when it is encrypted, it doesn't guarantee that once it is
unencrypted to be used that it can't be viewed (or stolen) by others.

Think of how simple it would be to write a wrapper DLL or library that
looks ands acts like some encrypt library but also diverts the contents.
It would be very very simple to do this.

Yes, it is possible to have this same thing happen in a corporation
under my control, but I can audit for it or lock the system down (well
almost). But in a remote site holding my data how can I be sure?

Chuck Wegrzyn

Monitoring the Cloud Performance

If you use Amazon's cloud here is a real-time performance and health
information for their top 5 services.

http://www.cloudstatus.com

I love the charts. If you are using SQS look at the lag time charts,
its horribly slow. Can someone confirm if you are seeing numbers so
bad.

Hyperic (the company that powered this service) is claiming that more
clouds will be added on their site which will be interesting for
comparing the performance.

Re: Grids and Clouds

Greg Pfister wrote:

On Jun 15, 10:58 am, Geoffrey Fox mailto:g...@grids.ucs.indiana.edu wrote:

There are 100's of Grid projects especially in universities and government arena. They have quite complicated software stacks such as   Glite UNICORE Globus Open Science Grid, OGSA etc. There are discussions of linkage of Grids and Clouds includinghttp://www.ogf.org/OGF23/materials/1303/Grid+cloud+comparative+study+...

 Thanks for the link. However, it seems to mainly be a "Why is EGEE better than Amazon EC2" pitch.

Interesting you read this into talk. The speaker at meeting came over IMHO as favoring clouds v. EGEE. The claim from EGEE in audience was that authorization system (VOMS) in EGEE could not be replicated by EC2. This was not to me a very convincing issue (maybe EGEE doesn't need this complexity. Probably could build VOMS as an addon to EC2 if needed to)

But it does raise a question for me:  Are the capabilities portrayed for EGEE typical of Grids? It looks like it's compute and storage allocation, workload management, file / filesystem management, user/group access & control.

I would consider EGEE as perhaps the most sophisticated "compute-file" grid. The Open Science Grid is USA activity with similar capabilities and software. TeraGrid and DEISA (European collection of supercomputers) support similar computing model but with fewer much larger base systems.
There are class of more data (database, sensor) oriented grids which are quite successful in areas like astronomy/bioinformatics/environmental science etc. These are built around the intrinsically distributed nature of data in many applications.

 If that's basically it, then lots of clouds provide lots of commercially-oriented middleware that doesn't appear in Grids. This would make sense, given the origins of both notions.  Again if the above is true, the answers to the questions below follow -- (inserted below)

and some growing expectation that cloud ideas/technologies should/will be used in Grids. One key question could be  a) Can Grids evolve usefully to be or to include Clouds. If so, what is evolution path?

 Sure, add all the commercial system support: databases, firewalls, transaction orientation (throughput orientation) providing simple scaling, etc.

b) Are clouds just different and one needs to start again possibly building selected Grid capabilities (such as Condor discussed often in this list or security infrastructure like VOMS) on a cloud platform/infrastructure?

 I suspect the biggest difference is the throughput orientation of many clouds. If your workload is lots of little requests,

Sensor Grids would have lots of little requests

 it's a fundamentally different game from one humongous galactic cluster simulation. -- Greg Pfister

--  : : Geoffrey Fox  gcf@indiana.edu FAX 8128567972 http://www.infomall.org : Phones Cell 812-219-4643 Home 8123239196 Lab 8128567977 : SkypeIn 812-669-0772 with voicemail, International cell 8123910207

Re: Issues of data in the cloud...

On Mon, Jun 23, 2008 at 4:46 PM, Jim Peters wrote:

Bad metaphor. If the bank loses the cash, the chances are good that BigCo can get it all back.

If some Clouds "R" Us. loses (or worse exposes) some data, all BigCo can do is get their money back. The damage is likely to be much greater than the piddly-ish amounts that BigCo will have paid Clouds R Us. Maybe they can slap Clouds "R" Us with a lawsuit that would put Clouds "R" Us out of business, but that doesn't remedy the situation.

+J

For every Clouds'R'Us almost always exists Cloud Life Insurance (inevitable?), that might cover risks of losing customer data.:)

The other thing is that such loss might have irrecoverable consequences like those related to industrial espionage cases.

Wednesday, June 18, 2008

IBM Cloud Computing Day

Earlier this week I had the opportunity of being invited to IBM's
Cloud Computing day at their Canadian headquarters in Markham Ontario
(just outside of Toronto). The invite only event brought together key
IBM employees and researchers from The Centre of Excellence for
Research in Adaptive Systems (CERAS) and focused on emerging
technologies, methods and architectures for cloud computing.

Before this event I had never heard of CERAS, they describe themselves
as an innovative, collaborative virtual organization which explores
and evolves promising new technologies, methods and techniques that
enable dramatically more agile approaches to software development and
evolution; approaches that enable delivery of software and computing
resources on demand and on time, with less operational effort. Simply
explained its a joint partnership between IBM research and a number of
University CS research labs.

One of the more interesting aspects of the event was Andrew Trossman's
introduction to Cloud Computing. His presentation looked more like a
comedy routine and was very entertaining. (At one point he answered a
phone call from his security guard at his home, which was hilarious)
One of the main points I took away from his presentation was that most
people at IBM really have no idea what cloud computing is and a few
select early adopters such as Trossman are key to pushing the cloud
agenda within IBM. I also found it interesting, that they do seem to
utilize a kind of internal "research cloud" for researches within IBM,
but appear to have no intentions to offer this type of service
commercially. They were vague on exactly what or how this cloud
worked.

Other interesting presentations included "Self-Optimization in the
Cloud" by Murray Woodside at Carleton University. He presented a
compelling approach to what he called "autonomic computing" whereby
resources levels are automatically adjusted based on application
response times. His presentation also touched upon "self healing"
system but did little explain how this would actually function.
Woodside's research seemed ideally suited for environments like Amazon
EC2 where you may need to adjust your virtual resources for short
periods of time. Although he was a little hazy on the which
technologies he used and whether it would ever be made available
commercially (I can only assume his research was based on IBM's Tivoli
suite). I look forward to seeing these features some day included in
IBM's data center software.

The brief presentation by Christina Amza on Dynamic Provisioning was
particularly interesting. She presented her work on the challenges to
dynamically "packing" virtual machines into the cloud using a unique
packing algorithm which helps determine the optimal location of each
VM. Her questions to me about Enomalism, was by far some of the most
difficult I've ever had to answer. Dynamic provisioning is in my
opinion one of the most difficult and potentially lucrative areas in
the development of clouds for both private and utility use. The
ability to effectively manage thousands of virtual and physical
servers may mean the difference between a profit and a complete
failure. Her research looks very promising and I know that I could
certainly use her work in our software if she ever decides to make it
publicly available (I assume IBM is thinking along the same lines.)

All in all It was interesting to get a birds-eye view of the cloud
computing programs going on within IBM's research labs and their
related technology groups. Although the event was fairly academic, it
did give me unique opportunity to see what IBM is up to. From my
outsiders point of view, I can summarize IBM's "blue cloud" as a way
for them to repackage their existing data center management tools to
enable the creation of "private clouds" for IBM's enterprise
customers. From what I saw I don't think we'll be seeing anything like
a Amazon EC2 or Google App Engine anytime in the near future. What I
think we will see from them is an active involvement in the
development of cloud computing technologies as well as number of
select cloud technology acquisitions.

(Original Post: http://elasticvapor.com/2008/06/ibm-cloud-computing-day.html)

--
--

Reuven Cohen
Founder & Chief Technologist, Enomaly Inc.

blog > www.elasticvapor.com

Re: Business Intelligence solution in Cloud Computing

On Wed, Jun 18, 2008 at 11:15 AM, Utpal Datta <utpal8376@gmail.com> wrote:

1. I think "data in the cloud" is so far a big block to widespread
adoption and using cloud for large, sensitive and mission critical
applications (espicially for Financial organization). Is someone
thinking of a way to leave the data within the user-premises and do
just the computing in the cloud? Kind of a reverse connection back to
the user datacenter.

That way the conventional data respositories can still be used. The
users will not have to worry about the reliability, availability and
(to a large part) security of the data. We still have to worry about
the security of the data travelling back and forth to and from the
cloud to the user data center.

This probably is more relevant for medium to large scale users with
"sensitive" data.

Comments? tips?

I was also thinking about some kind of staged DMZ-like data island on premises (with enforced access policies),

that has protected communication/transport channel to various compute cloud providers.

As a simple example, I had a use case with Maya3D render job using NFS/SMB shares for input and output files, where NFS server is located on premises and rendering process was done by multiple remote nodes at Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud, orchestrated by LSF.

salut,

Khaz Sapenov

Re: Cloud Definitions

I think one of the problems here is that some cloud-based web services, particularly very scalable ones, such as databases are essentially defined by their limitations in material ways. Any standard that could be consistently and properly supported across most services may necessarily be so constrained that you lose most of your functionality or so broad that no one can reasonably implement the spec for fundamental architectural reasons. Finding a balance that people are happy with will be difficult, and at this stage in the game I think many types of services (like cloud database services) are so limited that it might be premature to define standards derived from the current weak implementations if the market is moving quickly -- you may lock out better ways.

Of course, standardization of interfaces does not imply practical portability, though it helps. There are plenty of examples where architectures behind the standard interface vary sufficiently that you end up writing for a specific architecture through the standard interface. (See: portability of SQL-based apps across databases that use different concurrency control models.) On the other hand, a lot of services should be effectively standardizable and it should be encouraged, but I think for some core services this will be harder than it sounds. Transparency of switching between cloud providers may be hard to come by even if the interfaces are the same.

Cheers,

Andrew

Re: Business Intelligence solution in Cloud Computing

Hi All

I am *very* new to this group. But i am really excited by the quality
of postings in the group. I am learning a lot, quickly.

I have a couple of questions. May be someone has some answers.

1. I think "data in the cloud" is so far a big block to widespread
adoption and using cloud for large, sensitive and mission critical
applications (espicially for Financial organization). Is someone
thinking of a way to leave the data within the user-premises and do
just the computing in the cloud? Kind of a reverse connection back to
the user datacenter.

That way the conventional data respositories can still be used. The
users will not have to worry about the reliability, availability and
(to a large part) security of the data. We still have to worry about
the security of the data travelling back and forth to and from the
cloud to the user data center.

This probably is more relevant for medium to large scale users with
"sensitive" data.

Comments? tips?

2. Considering the "cloud computing" is at the beginning of its
adoption curve, the user data center will, for a long time, have a
mixture of their own Physical, Virtual devices within their datacenter
along with their "virtual" datacenters in one or more clouds (may be
from different vendors).

The user will obviously look for a management portal that seamlessly
crosses the boundaries of Physical, Virtual and Cloud devices (for
discovery, monitoring at the very least).

Are there some talk/thought on standardizing the "cloud managemnet
actions" and "cloud management data" interfaces?

Comments? tips?

Thanks

--utpal

Re: GPU-based Compute Cloud

Here is another step to GPU cloud:

Acceleware released the world's first commercially available GPU-based cluster solution, the C30-16 (16 GPUs expandable to 64 NVidia Tesla GPUs).

quote:

The GPU cluster solution combined with Acceleware's computational algorithms was benchmarked with data provided by end users, confirming processing power capable of solving problems billions of cells in size with speeds approaching 14 Gigacells per second for electronic design customers. At these processing speeds, Acceleware's C30-16 is competitive against traditional, more expensive clusters of around 1000 cores. For seismic customers using techniques like Reverse Time Migration, problem sets in the range of billions of cells over thousands of square kilometers found in large marine surveys will now be commercially possible with the Acceleware solution.

source:
http://www.acceleware.com/newsEvents/newsreleasearchive/20080617clustersolution.cfm

salut,
Khaz Sapenov

Re: Business Intelligence solution in Cloud Computing

For data intensive requirements such as clickstream analysis, Call
data reports etc, there is a cloud edition available from Vertica in
Amazon web services.

check here for the details:

http://solutions.amazonwebservices.com/connect/entry.jspa?externalID=1469

If you have huge data and have issues in generating data intensive
reports, vertica's columnar on the cloud architecture will be a good
option.
--
Best Regards,
Dilli Babu
On-line Computing Architect,
DataSisar,
5 & 6 Walton road,
Bangalore-560001
E-mail: dillibabu@datasisar.com
Mobile:+919449191299
Visit:http://www.datasisar.com

Re: Business Intelligence solution in Cloud Computing

This is one link I have seen but I have not used it they are providing BI solutins on EC2
Pentaho
http://blog.vmdatamine.com/2007/08/pentaho-business-intelligence-suite-on.html
Weka
http://blog.vmdatamine.com/2008/02/gridweka-on-ec2.html

-Subhasis

Tuesday, June 17, 2008

Re: Cloud Definitions

IMHO, you're clouding up the terms ;-). IMO, grid generally refers to
a flavor of technologies which usually has some kind of work
dispatcher that schedules work do be performed on various nodes.
Globus, platform lsf, datasynapse to name a few all share this common
pattern.

Over the years there was a new term spoken about called "enterprise
grid" which tried to stretch the term from the classic grid tools to
encompass broader dynamic infrastructures including rapid provisioning
etc. This never really seemed to stick, as a term - and the
technologies have been challenging.

When server virtualization made it to x86, many of these rapid
provisioning environments started to leverage the technology to
simplify and improve overall system reliability, predictability, and
manageability. In fact, I recall this being used by IBM for its
partners called the virtual loaner program back in 2003. The system
allowed partners to "borrow" a slice of a system-p server to test
their software. This was based on a hypervisor called p-hype.

Many adopters of this kind of rapid provisioning built self service
interfaces to allow end users to allocate and release resources on
demand. When Amazon offered this kind of service publicly, they
called it cloud computing.

The term cloud has been used to refer to web based systems and
services for some time. So cloud computing seems appropriate to
encompass some kind of virtual computing platform in the sky. To me
this means that the service running in the cloud must offer a means
for programmability - ok this gets vague. Virtual x86 machines are
certainly user programmable as is AppEx, Bungee, AppEngine, etc. What
about DabbleDB, QuickBase or Zoho? I think so. In fact, I think ning
or even g.ho.st are "programmable" computing platforms delivered as a
service running in the _cloud_.

In the end, this is just a word ;-). I think the more interesting
thing is to examine the services that are exposed/delivered from the
_cloud_. Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) should include things
like storage, network and compute resources. Platform as a Service
(PaaS) would include slightly higher level services like bigtable,
simpledb, appex, or even SQS.

Sure the lines get blurred when we label them - but the key is the
service offering. IMHO, compute services that are highly reusable
should be standardized - e.g. VMs, Storage, SQS, bigtable, layer 2
partitioning (Vlans), router and firewall services, load balancing
services, caching services, storage volume services, SAN connectivity
services etc. In a sense, everything you find in a datacenter should
be virtualized and exposed programmatically. All this stuff is
already virtual and programmable - but all proprietary. Back in the
day, the OGSA might have created standardized interfaces for all these
data center resources. In fact there are products that expose this
kind of infrastructure as wsdm resources. Unfortunately WS_dum_ ;-)
got hosed and eclipsed by ws-man - oh well ;-).

So let's try again with restful http based, json, etc.

I'd like to see standardization work its way up the infrastructure and
application stack.

thoughts?

Re: Cloud Definitions

The following link also has provided me with a good view.

"IBM Google Announcement on Internet-Scale Computing : Cloud Computing Model"
http://user.chol.com/~forlinux/Library/20080219/03._Cloud_Computing_Oct_03_Ext.pdf

Some parts quoted from the above material:

What is Cloud Computing?

An emerging computing paradigm where data and
services reside in massively scalable data centers and
can be ubiquitously accessed from any connected
devices over the internet.

Characteristics of Cloud Computing:

+ Virtual: Physical location and underlying infrastructure details are transparent to users
+ Scalable: Able to break complex workloads into pieces to be served across an incrementally expandable infrastructure
+ Efficient: Services Oriented Architecture for dynamic provisioning of shared compute resources
+ Flexible: Can serve a variety of workload types - both consumer and commercial

On Wed, Jun 18, 2008 at 9:44 AM, Brian MyungJune JUNG wrote:

Pretty good to re-visit the definition of Cloud Computing.

In addition to that of the previous mail,
I think it may also be helpful to consider the following definition of Cloud.
(quoted from IBM white paper on Cloud Computing -
http://download.boulder.ibm.com/ibmdl/pub/software/dw/wes/hipods/Cloud_computing_wp_final_8Oct.pdf)

-----BEGIN QUOTE-----

What is a cloud?
Cloud computing is a term used to describe both a platform and type of application.

A cloud computing platform dynamically provisions, configures, reconfigures, and deprovisions servers as
needed. Servers in the cloud can be physical machines or virtual machines. Advanced clouds
typically include other computing resources such as storage area networks (SANs), network
equipment, firewall and other security devices.
Cloud computing also describes applications that are extended to be accessible through the
Internet. These cloud applications use large data centers and powerful servers that host Web
applications and Web services. Anyone with a suitable Internet connection and a standard
browser can access a cloud application.

Definition

A cloud is a pool of virtualized computer resources. A cloud can:
• Host a variety of different workloads, including batch-style back-end jobs and interactive,
user-facing applications
• Allow workloads to be deployed and scaled-out quickly through the rapid provisioning of
virtual machines or physical machines
• Support redundant, self-recovering, highly scalable programming models that allow
workloads to recover from many unavoidable hardware/software failures
• Monitor resource use in real time to enable rebalancing of allocations when needed

Cloud computing environments support grid computing by quickly providing physical and virtual
servers on which the grid applications can run. Cloud computing should not be confused with
grid computing. Grid computing involves dividing a large task into many smaller tasks that run
in parallel on separate servers. Grids require many computers, typically in the thousands, and
commonly use servers, desktops, and laptops.
Clouds also support nongrid environments, such as a three-tier Web architecture running standard
or Web 2.0 applications. A cloud is more than a collection of computer resources because a
cloud provides a mechanism to manage those resources. Management includes provisioning,
change requests, reimaging, workload rebalancing, deprovisioning, and monitoring.

-----END QUOTE-----

Is this enough to make it clear?
Or could/should we add more?

Best regards,
Brian.

On Wed, Jun 18, 2008 at 7:34 AM, trevoro wrote:

There have been some awesome discussions on this group and many
others, and every time I read or talk with someone I feel like things
are congealing into something more solid.

One thing that seems to be confusing a lot of different people are
some of the definitions regarding cloud computing, specifically
regarding the difference between, cloud, grid, rapid provisioning, and
cloud storage.

I would define Cloud Computing as the overarching concept of all of
the outsourced,rapid provisioning,pay-per-use services that exist
today - Ideally with a low barrier to entry and the ability to
automate your environment.

Grid Computing seems to be services that are extremely granular or
'lightweight clouds'. Pay per usage on a per request model, rather
than an hourly model. Eg: AppEngine

Rapid Provisioning would be services that are more 'heavyweight'. Pay
per usage on a time model, with the real benefit being getting your
service online quickly, and being able to turn it off when possible.
Eg: EC2.

Many providers fall in between these or combine each of their
elements. Do we attempt to define this scale, or simply keep
everything abstracted as a 'cloud'?

-Trevor

http://layerboom.com

--
Brian M. JUNG # Peace Love Empathy & a Rose @}`-,--

brian.m.jung@gmail.com
http://blifelog.blogspot.com/

--
Brian M. JUNG # Peace Love Empathy & a Rose @}`-,--

brian.m.jung@gmail.com
http://blifelog.blogspot.com/

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Cloud Definitions

There have been some awesome discussions on this group and many
others, and every time I read or talk with someone I feel like things
are congealing into something more solid.

One thing that seems to be confusing a lot of different people are
some of the definitions regarding cloud computing, specifically
regarding the difference between, cloud, grid, rapid provisioning, and
cloud storage.

I would define Cloud Computing as the overarching concept of all of
the outsourced,rapid provisioning,pay-per-use services that exist
today - Ideally with a low barrier to entry and the ability to
automate your environment.

Grid Computing seems to be services that are extremely granular or
'lightweight clouds'. Pay per usage on a per request model, rather
than an hourly model. Eg: AppEngine

Rapid Provisioning would be services that are more 'heavyweight'. Pay
per usage on a time model, with the real benefit being getting your
service online quickly, and being able to turn it off when possible.
Eg: EC2.

Many providers fall in between these or combine each of their
elements. Do we attempt to define this scale, or simply keep
everything abstracted as a 'cloud'?

-Trevor

http://layerboom.com

Re: Business Intelligence solution in Cloud Computing

Ramesh,
I know similar solution from NASDAQ
quote:
NASDAQ Market Replay provides a NASDAQ-validated replay and analysis of the activity in the stock market. The application is built using the Adobe Flex and AIR platform, and utilizes the Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3) for persisting historical market data.
sources:
https://data.nasdaq.com/mr.aspx and
http://www.infoq.com/articles/nasdaq-case-study-air-and-s3

salut,
Khaz Sapenov

On Tue, Jun 17, 2008 at 3:40 PM, SRINIVASAN GANESAN wrote:

Folks,
Thanks for sharing valuable points....Just by reading the postings i have picked up quite a bit of information...
I was wondering if any of you have experience (or know a vendor) in running a data warehouse based business intelligence solution in a cloud.
For instance, accept data through FTP, run it through an ETL tool to load the dimensional model and point the reports, dashboards and what not against the model...
Do the cloud vendors support this model?
Thanks
Ramesh.

Business Intelligence solution in Cloud Computing

Folks,
Thanks for sharing valuable points....Just by reading the postings i have picked up quite a bit of information...
I was wondering if any of you have experience (or know a vendor) in running a data warehouse based business intelligence solution in a cloud.
For instance, accept data through FTP, run it through an ETL tool to load the dimensional model and point the reports, dashboards and what not against the model...
Do the cloud vendors support this model?
Thanks
Ramesh.

Re: Papers on cloud computing

Which leads us to the question: cloud computing vs. grid computing ;-)
here an interesting one on the topic how grid and cloud are different:
https://edms.cern.ch/document/925013/

and another one: TECHNICAL REPORT TR-08-07: AN EVALUATION OF AMAZON'S
GRID COMPUTING SERVICES EC2, S3 AND SQS. http://www.simson.net/clips/academic/2007.Harvard.S3.pdf

Re: What questions would you ask CIOs/CSOs on the topics of SaaS?

What about an open question on the kinds of areas where they see SaaS
being of most value compared with other things?

Jenny

Monday, June 16, 2008

Re: What questions would you ask CIOs/CSOs on the topics of SaaS?

I would want to ask:

What challenges are they currently facing in the on-premise model?
What considerations would they like to see solved (or answered) for
them to adopt the SaaS model? (Things like security, availability,
etc.)
And maybe to tweak Reuven's question -- how familiar are you with SaaS
and/or cloud computing? (multiple choice answers)

Oh, you might want to check out surveymonkey.com too -- it's a tool we
use to build surveys.

Cheers,
Macel

Re: Have you outgrown cloud/utility services and went back to your own bare metal?

If you get real big at AWS, you can start negotiating with them for special deals. I would assume the same from all other vendors.

On Thu, Jun 12, 2008 at 8:34 PM, jallspaw wrote:

Does anyone have any experience with organizations who have 'outgrown'
using a cloud/utility service? At some point, either the application
is specific enough to fall through the cracks of the cloud provider's
menu of offerings (or price menu) or the scale becomes large enough
that it doesn't make economic sense not to run your own machines.

More info here: http://www.kitchensoap.com/2008/02/27/when-do-you-get-too-big-to-use-cloudy-stuff/

I'm looking for examples of this, if you are one of those that outgrew
something like AWS, then please email me.
Why: finishing up a book for O'Reilly on capacity planning, will touch
on this stuff.

thanks in advance,
john allspaw

RE: Banking on the Cloud

I think there is a “Verticalization” opportunity on top of the proverbial cloud. At my company, we provide a niche product to securely & virtually facilitate major corporate sales (IPO, buyouts, etc.). We provide the technology and outsource the data hosting to our provider (SAS 70 II compliant of course).

There is definite opportunity for expansion into other services (for the financial vertical and many others) and a compelling cost advantage will certainly pique interest.

From: cloud-computing@googlegroups.com [mailto:cloud-computing@googlegroups.com] On Behalf Of Jens Iversen
Sent: Monday, June 16, 2008 1:54 PM
To: cloud-computing@googlegroups.com
Subject: RE: Banking on the Cloud

…it probably isn’t quite as easy as that.

Banks, well at least the ones that mostly abide by the rules and standards, have certain prerogatives as a result thereof. And one of them is “auditing” (SOX, Basel I…II etc).

If cloud computing, mass-virtualization of servers, computing power and storage, are a great concept (and indeed fact), this concept still lacks way behind in practical application for large scale adoption by financial institutions because of the current lack of support of (and hence control) of “multi-tenancy-monitoring-reporting-and-management”…in fact, those terms are antithesis to what one can leverage w virtualization and achieve with cloud-computing.

And that is the service-provider-view.

The Telco/carrier service-providers have been in this business for years. They stand testimony to the fact that it takes significant investments to offer a control-pane that can and will “monitor/report/manage” multi-technologies in the moving world of demand & supply and security and quality. The data-network technologists entered the SP-space and had to learn this lesson the hard way.

Today, only few of the fundamental technologies of virtualization provide tools to that effect, and even when they do, they tend to be limited to that technology only –ignoring all the other ingredient components of the overall cloud –and how good is that when you want “service”, right?

Let’s not forget that CIOs and TIO’s of banks (and others, of course) are answering to management who request data that support the board’s very low appetite for risk… In short, they need to be able to demonstrate, quite really, that standards are being met, reliably and consistently. And that they (the IT-org) are verrrry likely to do so in the future. “Nothing fancy. Conservative, yes please. Thank you. Just like that. No thanks, nothing on the side. Plain vanilla.” …and banks are NOT going to run the risk of facing such eventualities of “sharing” customer information, or retrieving another bank’s information. IT is just plainly inconceivable. And since they are being asked to demonstrate how they are performing in their ability to “avoid such unhappy encounters” –and because nobody offers tools to demonstrate that—they simply stay away from the burning edges of that stove.

That doesn’t mean that such CIO/TIO levels don’t have the necessary “get-it” factor of cloud-computing. No, it means that specific requirements aren’t being met with a single technology, and anyways, not without significant integration* effort of tools that can monitor/report & manage this.

CIO’s indeed are –or if they get a 2^nd chance, become—a most responsible breed.

(*notice that such integration, would invariably also mean “fixing” and “setting” and hence creating structures, which are anaemic to the dynamic of virtualisation.)

De : cloud-computing@googlegroups.com [mailto:cloud-computing@googlegroups.com] De la part de Reuven Cohen
Envoyé : lundi 16 juin 2008 21:35
À : cloud-computing@googlegroups.com
Objet : Re: Banking on the Cloud

So what you're saying is a "Bank Cloud" might be a matter of product positioning and less about the risk in outsourcing their infrastructure. This would also explain their concerns about Amazon.

reuven

On Mon, Jun 16, 2008 at 2:59 PM, thomas.purves@gmail.com <thomas.purves@gmail.com> wrote:

It's important to remember that banks outsource a lot of data,
customer information and processing already. Pretty much cloud
computing and they've been doing it for ages. The catch is most of
these vendors focus specifically on the financial industry and the
computing is integrated tightly with other business services and
processes (so it's not pure cloud computing by any means).

For example TSYS maintains credit card accounts and processes
billions (probably near trillions) in card transactions a year for
bank clients.

The specs and the systems exist it's just up to the cloud computing
providers to meet the requirements and put up with the audits etc.

--
--

Reuven Cohen
Founder & Chief Technologist, Enomaly Inc.
www.enomaly.com :: 416 848 6036 x 1
skype: ruv.net // aol: ruv6

blog > www.elasticvapor.com
-
Get Linked in> http://linkedin.com/pub/0/b72/7b4

Sunday, June 15, 2008

AWS and Amazon capacity during peaks like Thanksgiving?

Greetings:

does anyone know how the load curves play out now that AWS customers generate more traffic than Amazon itself?

How do both worlds get along during peak periods like Thanksgiving?

Did Amazon have to add capacity for AWS, thereby reducing overal capacity utilization again?

Or is AWS' load curve flatter than Amazon's ?

Thanks for any pointers :)

Best
Christoph

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Saturday, June 14, 2008

Re: GPU-based Compute Cloud

I believe there will be clouds that offer specialized services that
take advantage of a certain processor or IO architecture and charge a
premium for it. My guess is that CDN vendors will look at pushing the
application to the "edge" along with the data. Whatever standard
shape the cloud takes (think EC2 vs. GAE) being able to push it around
the globe will be a value added feature of a particular cloud.

On Jun 14, 7:37 pm, Paul Moen <paulm...@gmail.com> wrote:
> Don't underestimate the power of specialization in driving compute
> clouds for specific compute tasks.
>
> It is not just GPUs, Kickfire (www.kickfire.com) have released a
> so-called SQL chip (DPU or SQLPU)?
>
> I see some reasons for software vendors looking at hardware, one is, if
> your software is becoming a commodity you need to move up or down the
> stack. So why not use FPGAs from Altera or Xilinx to test run burning
> your software into hardware.
>
> The other reason is the recent super computing record using the IBM cell
> chip which is used in current game consoles. Essentially people are
> rediscovering the power of parallelization and also specialization that
> game console makers have known for ages. The current PC and Server CPUs
> are made to be good at many tasks, the future may involve increased
> specialization of hardware for specific tasks.
>
> If you were are Database as a service provider and had a stack of
> kickfire applicances, suddenly given the performance gains of running
> part of the database in hardware means you can host more databases per
> machine per cubic feet (or cubic metre) having a real impact your bottom
> line.
>
> Have Fun
>
> Paul
>
> http://blog.dbadojo.comhttp://blog.vmdatamine.com

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Re: GPU-based Compute Cloud

Don't underestimate the power of specialization in driving compute
clouds for specific compute tasks.

It is not just GPUs, Kickfire (www.kickfire.com) have released a
so-called SQL chip (DPU or SQLPU)?

I see some reasons for software vendors looking at hardware, one is, if
your software is becoming a commodity you need to move up or down the
stack. So why not use FPGAs from Altera or Xilinx to test run burning
your software into hardware.

The other reason is the recent super computing record using the IBM cell
chip which is used in current game consoles. Essentially people are
rediscovering the power of parallelization and also specialization that
game console makers have known for ages. The current PC and Server CPUs
are made to be good at many tasks, the future may involve increased
specialization of hardware for specific tasks.

If you were are Database as a service provider and had a stack of
kickfire applicances, suddenly given the performance gains of running
part of the database in hardware means you can host more databases per
machine per cubic feet (or cubic metre) having a real impact your bottom
line.

Have Fun

Paul

http://blog.dbadojo.com
http://blog.vmdatamine.com

What kind of Service Guarantees should we expect from PaaS??

Peter Laird wrote up a great analysis on Terms of Service for SaaS
providers
(http://peterlaird.blogspot.com/2008/06/good-bad-and-ugly-of-saas-terms-
of.html) and it got me wondering: What about the emerging Platform as a
Service providers?

They've got an especially difficult challenge because they're running
other people's code. How do you ensure availability when it's not your
code? Google's App Engine conspicuously avoids the problem by not
providing any SLA.

Generally speaking, there seems be three categories of providers:

# Infrastructure, managed hosting and run time environments:OpSource,
Etelos, Joyent, AWS, GAE, etc
# Cloud IDEs: Bungee Labs, etc.
# App Builders: Coghead, LongJump, etc.

Obviously, the closer you get to bare metal, the harder it is for you to
provide service guarantees.

AWS provides for 99.9% in their SLA, but that's only for the service
itself. Nowhere in this document does it say anything about your image's
uptime. Seems that you are on your own entirely.

http://www.amazon.com/S3-SLA-AWS/b?ie=UTF8&node=379654011

This is a tricky problem even for the app builders. They all support
some kind of scripting environment and you can only sandbox so much. Not
to pick on CogHead, but I found this post on their forum. So, as you can
see, these problems are going to show up everywhere.

http://blogs.zdnet.com/SAAS/?p=489

I'd love to hear from anyone that has more details on SLA from platform
providers.

Original Blog Post http://blog.snaplogic.org/?p=201
__________________________________
Chris Marino
SnapLogic, Inc.
Really Simple Integration
www.snaplogic.com
650-655-7200

Friday, June 13, 2008

Re: GPU-based Compute Cloud

Good article in HPCWire this week on when and when not to use
accelerators:
http://www.hpcwire.com/features/In-Socket_Accelerators__When_to_Use_Them.html

One illustrative quote:
**********************************
For 2008, the industry buzzwords are "hardware acceleration." CPU
vendors are integrating custom integrated IP into their chips. AMD and
Intel are creating an ecosystem for third party accelerators, named
Torenzza and QuickAssist. GPU vendors are setting their sights on
general purpose functionality. Meanwhile, a host of other chip
companies, too many to mention, are developing new products that
target this high performance computing (HPC) market.

A little known fact in the HPC community is that the embedded
computing market has always solved their problems with a combination
of CPUs and accelerators. Due to different space, weight, power, and
environmental requirements for high performance embedded computing
(HPEC), a large portion of those accelerators are implemented with
field programmable gate arrays (FPGAs) from companies like Altera,
Xilinx, and others.

As these two markets collide,....
***********************************

--
Greg Pfister

Re: Banking on the Cloud

Reuven's post resonates with me - its all about making money.

I've recently finished a project that involved rolling out a web service that literally saved our company a million dollars per week in profits. The service had to scale to all of our company's e-Commerce traffic in the US, and had to work in real-time (not a batch process). In part of our company's SaaS infrastructure and experience - the service was built / integrated / and deployed in exactly 60 days with a team of about 7 engineers.

Because the company I work for is essentially "in-the-cloud" already, it won't be that hard to expose that particular service around to others - (not likely in the near term because Amazon's use case was really specialized).

Cloud computing and SaaS is really going to take off when :
1) Companies learn how to use SaaS/cloud computing to truly make "big money"
2) Cloud computing providers provide the infrastructure to do so.

Regards,
Alan Ho

----- Original Message ----
From: Reuven Cohen <r..@enomaly.com>
To: cloud-computing <cloud-computing@googlegroups.com>
Sent: Thursday, June 12, 2008 8:05:56 PM
Subject: Banking on the Cloud

I've spent the last few days hanging out with a bunch of bankers at the annual Morgan Stanley CTO Summit in San Francisco. The invite only event mixes the top Morgan Stanley technology personnel, emerging technology companies and key players in the venture capital world.

Cloud Computing was a noticeably "hot topic" of conversation at this years summit. My invitation to this years event was a rare opportunity to pick the brains of the true enterprise decision makers on the challenges as well as the opportunities for cloud computing within an large financial environment. This year was particularly interesting because of the downturn in the finance market and challenges associated with it.

I was surprised by just how informative this event actually was, I figured it would be just another "bankers" tech get together. I was wrong. Below are some of the key points I took away from the summit.

Cloud Computing was front and center this year. One of the more interesting points that kept reoccurring was the need for better security. There seems to be a definite desire to use "Cloud Infrastructure" both internally within high performance computing, trading platforms and other various software platform services. There seems to a genuine desire to use external cloud resources such as Amazon. The need to secure data in the cloud was one of their single biggest concern. Those who offer this kind of "bridge to the cloud" will be the ones who will bring the most value to the banking industry. What is interesting, for the time being they seem more interested in keeping their "compute resources" safely tucked under the mattress then putting it to the hands of a "book store". (Personally I'd rather keep my money in the bank where it is safe and more easily managed in the same way I'd rather keep my computing infrastructure in a well managed cloud rather then in my office closet. Until the major banks realize this, I don't foresee a lot of movement toward the public cloud.)

Another interesting take away, the traditional enterprise sales model is dead. Getting in through the back door is the way of the future. SaaS, Cloud and Open source are all viable options and in some ways preferred. They provide a frictionless way for IT works within Morgan Stanley a way to try new approaches, services and technologies. They were also quick to point out that whether or not the software was traditional or hosted was secondary to what "problem" it solved. The ability to solve a partcular problem was the most important aspect in getting your product or service in the door, this point is more important then any license applied to the technology. So don't focus on the "it's SaaS", focus on the problem.

Also interesting was the declaration that cost is not always a major part of the decision process when looking at software and related services. One example was provided by a top level VP, his story involed a 2,000 server deployment used for some sort of risk analysis (he was vague). This deployment of 2,000 servers easily costs them several million dollars, moreover they only use these servers for about 1 hour per month (if at all). But when they do use these servers, on that one day when the "market goes crazy" it could mean the difference between a 2 billion dollar loss or a 1 billion dollar profit. His numbers may have been an exaggerated a bit, but the point hit home. (It's all about making money)

Another area that kept being mentioned was virtual desktop deployments are big business for the bank. VDI users now have the ability to work within their own "context" and have their personal desktop environment move with them. No longer do IT staff need to continuely maintain desktops onsite thus saving the bank a lot of time and resources. They also made mention that "human resources" is their biggest technology cost. If a employee changes position, moves to a new office and leaves all together, it's now just a couple clicks saving the bank a lot of money.

Interesting was the amount of data integration companies at the event. Based on the sheer volume of data integration companies at the event, I would say they are looking seriously at this area, although my conversations didn't touch upon this topic. (I was way to busy pushing my cloud agenda.)

One of the biggest surprises was regardless of the downturn in the markets, Morgan Stanley is on track to spend more then ever on their IT budget. They seem to think that during periods of lower economic activity it gives them a rare opportunity to establish themselves in new areas of emerging technology that my give them a competitive advantage down the road. They also seem to think that their use of technology will directly influence their ability to maintain their lead in the lucrative tech IPO market (which appears to be none existent this year). They went on to say that the companies that emerge during the hardtimes tend to do better in the long term (Think Google). Morgan Stanley is ready to apply this to their own business and I applaud them for it. If I ever go IPO, I know who will represent me!

(Original Post: http://elasticvapor.com/2008/06/banking-on-cloud.html)
--
--

Reuven Cohen
Founder & Chief Technologist, Enomaly Inc.

blog > www.elasticvapor.com
-
Get Linked in> http://linkedin.com/pub/0/b72/7b4

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Re: Reliability in of the cloud

These capabilities have been standard in Oracle Coherence for a long
time, including two-way replication (multi-master hot-hot with
customizable reconciliation), and have been in production use by
banks, exchanges etc. for some time now on systems of dozens up to
hundreds of servers. This has been one of the key differentiating
factors for Coherence, and by now has helped us gain almost every
major bank as a customer, so I was quite surprised to read your
comment.

Peace,

Cameron Purdy Oracle
http://www.oracle.com/technology/products/coherence/index.html

Re: Cloud Service comparison: Google App Engine vs. Joyent

Although, it must be pointed out, that each of the "hardware as a
service" vendor have their own limitations in terms of OSes and/or
server stack images that can be used. To provide a generic service,
some sacrifices must be made for flexibility. This has always been
true for software frameworks and even languages (try using Ruby on
Rails for a time critical embedded system), but we are now seeing it
when it comes to "operating systems for the cloud".

Frankly, I'd rather have the OS dependency than the language
dependency, unless the framework provided met my needs exactly. Then,
I'd take the framework any day, as it hides more of the operational
issues that I just wouldn't care about.

James

On Jun 12, 2:26 pm, randall <rand...@qrimp.com> wrote:
> Just to be clear, Facebook is not using Joyent, rather the vendors of
> apps that run within Facebook are using Joyent. I'm sure part of the
> popularity is just due to the fact that Joyent has been around a lot
> longer than AppEngine.
>
> The language issue isn't superficial in my opinion. AppEngine
> customers face vendor lock in on a significant scale because the
> entire AppEngine platform is proprietary with bigtable, mapreduce,
> etc. Joyent, Mosso and others don't suffer his vendor lock in, because
> they support more standard environments like relational databases and
> an array of programming languages.
>
> On top of that, you have the Googlenoia and growing impression of
> Google as the company putting smaller application providers out of
> business, replacing Microsoft as the company everyone loves to hate.
>
> - randall
>
> On Jun 12, 3:05 pm, "Michael Moran" <professor.mo...@gmail.com> wrote:
>
> > According to the "Cloud Computing" entry in Wikipedia, it states
> > that "Currently 25% of Facebook daily active application usage runs on
> > Joyent." Can anyone provide reasons why Facebook uses Joyent instead of,
> > say, Google App Engine?
> > Also, in more general terms, can anyone provide examples where Joyent would
> > be better than Google App Engine, or vice-versa?
> > Superficially, it appears the main difference, from a developers point of
> > view, is that Joyent offers wider language support than Google's App Engine
> > (python only).
>
> > Thank you very much,
>
> > --Michael
> > Miami, FL

RE: "Follow the Law" computing

Data sovereignty is what they call it in New Zealand. I heard that the government in NZ made banks move IT back to NZ from Sydney for this reason.

________________________________

From: cloud-computing@googlegroups.com on behalf of James Urquhart
Sent: Fri 6/13/2008 9:02 AM
To: cloud-computing@googlegroups.com
Subject: Re: "Follow the Law" computing

Andrew,

Fascinating response. Thank you.

I especially like the term "political integrity". I think this is what the battle will be about: business expediency versus political integrity.

James

----- Original Message ----
From: Andrew Rogers <....@yahoo.com>
To: cloud-computing@googlegroups.com
Sent: Friday, June 13, 2008 8:44:30 AM
Subject: Re: "Follow the Law" computing

I've been involved in a number of international policy discussions and architecture designs for distributed system that make those policies reasonably enforceable. In some ways you've over-complicated it though I would note that the set of requirements are in many cases internally inconsistent at a basic theoretical level (d'oh!).

The really short version is that there is a lot of interest and agreement among governments in keeping services and even public data physically within their political jurisdiction. This is the lowest common denominator for all intents and purposes. Now, obviously most countries are unlikely to forbid non-governmental services from leaving the country, but it is very much on their mind. This is also being mixed with distributed and decentralized authentication frameworks for some semblance of service verification. The really hard part is designing a metadata protocol that can support everything the want. The major upside to this is that their (possibly correct) paranoia and desire for interoperability is forcing them to think about globally distributed cloud computing that interoperates at a low-level e.g. standards for very tight integration of services behind political firewalls that can be guaranteed at some level to maintain the political integrity of
those services. It sounds like a good basis for secure interoperability generally.

The consequences of this is that a cloud computing provider should probably think about portability and the ability to manage physical location as a first-class capability. This will be particularly true if it is a specialized cloud that takes advantage of service integration in some fashion. There will be some political advantage to being able to throw up a mini-cloud in a particular jurisdiction as needed -- it gives a lot of bureaucrats warm fuzzies even if it doesn't make sense. No need to have law-based routing, they want the services to be in *their* jurisdiction, which is a very simple policy.

The private sector may care much less about this, but if politics dictates some kind of locality of infrastructure for their own needs it may drive similar decisions by default in the private sector simply because they have a physically local cloud infrastructure. So in a way, this addresses the question raised. If governments ultimately dictate (officially or unofficially) political locality for cloud control purposes, I expect we'll eventually end up with clouds physically located in a large number of jurisdictions that private sector users can choose for whatever purposes suit them. Obviously this means that some governments will setup policies that are politically very friendly to cloud computing in an effort to attract business, particularly if interoperability of services becomes easy and tight.

Or at least that is where I see this going.

Andrew

--- On Fri, 6/13/08, j..@yahoo.com <ju..@yahoo.com> wrote:
>
> - However, both Canada and France have provided examples of
> policies set with the Geopolitical realities of "the
> cloud" in mind. (Canada prohibits public IT projects from
> running in US data centers due to the Patriot Act, and
> France refuses to allow government employees to use
> Blackberries as the communications are processed in the
> UK and US where France fears interception risk is high.)
>
> - So, why not consider moving workload to wherever the
> current task is "most legal" using a combination of
> database sharding, database replication and
> vmotion/livemotion. At the very least, make it damn
> near impossible for a single jurisdiction to nail you with
> a violation.

Re: "Follow the Law" computing

Hi all,

On Friday 13 June 2008 16:25:36 Chris Marino wrote:
> >-----Original Message-----
> >On Behalf Of jur...@yahoo.com
[...]
> >moving compute load over the course of an earth day to the dark
> >side of the planet. It is generally called "follow the moon".

Sorry, it's Friday and a distraction, I couldn't let that one pass.

Our Moon orbits the Earth a little under a month, not once a day.

Although generally most visable during night time, it's also visable in the
evening or morning, often some time before dusk or after dawn (respectively).
The Moon is also (spectacularly) visable during a solar eclipses. So, it
isn't always night-time when you can seen the Moon.

The converse also isn't true: when the moon is roughly in conjunction with the
sun, it is not visable at night time at all.

So, in no sense is this following the moon.

Cheers,

Paul.

Re: "Follow the Law" computing

Andrew,

Fascinating response. Thank you.

I especially like the term "political integrity". I think this is what the battle will be about: business expediency versus political integrity.

James

----- Original Message ----
From: Andrew Rogers <j...@yahoo.com>
To: cloud-computing@googlegroups.com
Sent: Friday, June 13, 2008 8:44:30 AM
Subject: Re: "Follow the Law" computing

Or at least that is where I see this going.

Andrew

--- On Fri, 6/13/08, jur....@yahoo.com <...@yahoo.com> wrote:
>
> - However, both Canada and France have provided examples of
> policies set with the Geopolitical realities of "the
> cloud" in mind. (Canada prohibits public IT projects from
> running in US data centers due to the Patriot Act, and
> France refuses to allow government employees to use
> Blackberries as the communications are processed in the
> UK and US where France fears interception risk is high.)
>
> - So, why not consider moving workload to wherever the
> current task is "most legal" using a combination of
> database sharding, database replication and
> vmotion/livemotion. At the very least, make it damn
> near impossible for a single jurisdiction to nail you with
> a violation.

Re: "Follow the Law" computing

Keep in mind, "jurisdiction" means "authority", and
there are several meanings of "authority"/"power"/"place".

There is the technically legal (primary law) and
then there is the wisy-washy legal (statutory, or
"case law").

The rule of thumb is that governemnts will extend
themselves to fill any "void", they'll assume power
until someone tells them otherwise. Usually, the
only entity that tells them otherwise is another
government employee, a judge.

It is the old adage;
"If they're doing it, they must be 'authorized' to
do it"; Not necessarily so.

What you're really talking about is economics.

Where is it cheapesat to run a job, and by cheap
I mean all aspects, regulatory, utility, hardware,
software, cooling, electical, labor force, etc.

Many Americans become Ex-pats, they move to Costa Rica,
Belize, etc. They move not because the laws are
any better, but because practically they have a better
chance of living a better life, being left alone,
or more reasonably paying the bribes to make this
so.

What I'm trying to say, is that the term "legal" is
not so black-and-white as one might think.

Our US "laws" such as the Patriot Act are technically
"Illegal". They conflict with the primary law of the
Constitution. But, if not overturned, they stand.
Citizens may (should) ignore such laws, but that
may not stop them from being thrown in the slammer.

The courts have a nasty habit of ruling in favor of
what's "practicle", as opposed to what's required of
them via the oath. They do what's politically
expedient.

It isn't cut and dry. There is what a "jurisdiction"
claims is legal, and there is what is technically
legal, and there is what is practically enforcable.

"Jurisdiction" also, interestingly, means "a place".
A place under a unified rule/ruler.

The US has a habit of sending a suponea to a "jurisdiction"
in which they have no power (like, Cayman), and then
they twist arms to get compliance. They play the
game on multiple levels (military, treaty, trade, etc.).

Look at offshore gambling for a template. It didn't
necessarily matter that this was outside US jurisdiction,
they shut it down in other ways, like credit card
processing (funding mechanisms).

--- ju...@yahoo.com wrote:

From: James Urquhart <ju...@yahoo.com>
To: cloud-computing@googlegroups.com
Subject: Re: "Follow the Law" computing
Date: Fri, 13 Jun 2008 08:25:19 -0700 (PDT)

I guess I wasn't clear enough when making my point. Its not about migrating because laws change in any one country, or even in general. Its about looking at your overall compute tasks, and figuring out which jurisdictions are most beneficial to the current task and/or data needs. In other words, moving workloads around the world to make sure that the overall workflow is always executed in a legally friendly geography. Or, moving and/or replicating data to make sure the action you wish to take against that data is handled as legally as possible.

Its about automating loopholes.

James

----- Original Message ----
From: Chris Marino <c...@snaplogic.com>
To: cloud-computing@googlegroups.com
Sent: Friday, June 13, 2008 7:25:36 AM
Subject: RE: "Follow the Law" computing

Laws and policies don't change very fast, if at all. Can't think of any
circumstances where I'd really want to move or migrate data because of
this.

Seems like a stretch to me.
CM

>-----Original Message-----
>From: cloud-computing@googlegroups.com
>[mailto:cloud-computing@googlegroups.com] On Behalf Of
>ju..@yahoo.com
>Sent: Friday, June 13, 2008 12:09 AM
>To: Cloud Computing
>Subject: "Follow the Law" computing
>
>I posted about a subject that I thought this group may like to chew on.
>
>- There is a theory out there about using cloud
>technologies--both public and private--to save on operational
>costs (such as electricity and cooling) by moving compute load
>over the course of an earth day to the dark side of the
>planet. It is generally called "follow the moon".
>
>- However, both Canada and France have provided examples of
>policies set with the Geopolitical realities of "the cloud" in
>mind. (Canada prohibits public IT projects from running in US
>data centers due to the Patriot Act, and France refuses to
>allow government employees to use Blackberries as the
>communications are processed in the UK and US where France
>fears interception risk is high.)
>
>- So, why not consider moving workload to wherever the current
>task is "most legal" using a combination of database sharding,
>database replication and vmotion/livemotion. At the very
>least, make it damn near impossible for a single jurisdiction
>to nail you with a violation.
>
>See http://blog.jamesurquhart.com/2008/06/follow-law-computing.html
>for the detailed rundown.
>
>I can't shake this vision, though I know there are many holes.
> What do you think?
>
>James

Monday, June 23, 2008

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