in a couple of weeks, with these panelists:
Randy Bryant CMU
Ian Foster Chicago
Greg Pfister Consultant
Dennis Quan IBM
Dan Reed Microsoft
As you can see, I'm there. With Geoffrey's permission, I'm sharing his
"Questions for the Panel" and my tentative answers with this group,
for comment and feedback. Whale away!
Q 1) What is and equally interestingly what isn't a cloud?
As Stu Charleton said, a cloud close up is a fog. He was talking about
clouds within the firewall, but I think that applies to the definition
in general. I intend to show a spectrum, with minimal-support hardware
rental on the right, adding more and more support (authentication,
storage, databases, load balancing, failover, auto-scaling…) through
the center, and ending up with full applications (Salesforce.com,
Myspace, WoW, etc.) on the left. Second Life is pretty far, but not
all the way to the left (see Q 7).
What isn't a cloud? Web 1.0 web pages. Simple on-the-web catalog
shopping. Powerpoint. :-) Anything where clients don't use it to build
their own apps.
Q 2) What is implication of Clouds for Enterprise Data Centers?
Lower cost, higher efficiency, downsizing.
Q 3) If TeraGrid evolves to PetaCloud, how would it look?
Some major differences from Grid:
- inclusion of significant commercial infrastructure (databases, etc.)
- usually, a base assumption that the application is "transactional":
lots of separate requests, not one big manually-parallelized program.
This implicitly supports horizontal scaling in an automatic or near-
automatic manner. (Not required, but that's the usual target.)
- less need for heavily tuned performance in the client's code,
allowing use of scripting languages (Google Apps, others) in sandboxes
to code the app.
So a grid is unlikely to become a cloud, except of course for
marketing / funding buzzword purposes.
Q 4) What are research issues for Clouds?
Ease / simplicity of use. Scaling of all components. Performance
monitoring. Geographical failover. Possibly interoperability and
standards.
Q 5) Can one (or who could) "trust" clouds?
We already do, inside corporate firewalls; clouds are already deployed
that way (customers invented clouds).
Outside the firewall – one must, to some degree, or the whole model
breaks. Legal implications for personal privacy may limit use outside
the firewall in some cases.
Q 6) Will Cloud interoperability be important; if so at what
interface(s) will it be provided?
It would certainly simplify life, but right how many providers are
happy with their walled gardens.
Q 7) What is the killer app for clouds?
The true "app" is lower cost of whole IT shops, hopefully coupled with
far better responsiveness. This alone could result in a major change
to how a wide swath of enterprise IT operates. All kinds of typical
commercial applications will be hosted – TWEaaS (The Whole Enchilada
as a Service).
However, narrowing the definition of "app" to what are traditionally
called applications, my personal favorite is cloud-level support for
virtual worlds.
All kinds of statistics point to a major uptake in the near future of
this technology. One recent one: Strategy Analytics estimates over the
next 10 years, 22% of all broadband users => over 1B people in one or
more virtual worlds. The infrastructure requirements for supporting
this are massive, heavily compute-intensive, and complex, requiring
the continuing simulation of the world.
This is a green-field area for IT shops that they will be more willing
to outsource to a cloud, as opposed to letting their current bread-and-
butter leave.
But most cloud vendors are as clueless as IT shops about this area, so
while it's low-hanging fruit, I don't know that they'll go after it.
--
Greg Pfister
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