IEEE CLOUD 2010 Conference, Day 2

Day 2 was the start of the main research presentations; I went to a few different talks, the following presentations were the more interesting ones:

Compliant Cloud Computing (C3): Architecture and Language Support for User-Driven Compliance Management in Clouds (CLOUD2010-3031)
Ivona Brandic, Schahram Dustdar, Tobias Anstett, David Schumm, Frank Leymann,and Ralf Konrad (Vienna University, Austria; University of Stuttgart, German; T-Systems International GmbH Frankfurt, Germanyy)
Ivona talked about some of the security, privacy and trust implications of cloud computing, it was refreshing to see someone who knew all the issues but had also done some research to address the issues. Most people agree that security, privacy and trust are important issues that need to be addressed in the cloud but very little work seems to be actually focused on addressing the issues. Ivona mentioned that the grid failed to address these issues and maybe these issues were simply not important for some of the workloads that run on grids. She provided an overview of their Compliant Cloud Computing (C3) middleware that supports developers who want to make use of several IaaS providers to host data. C3 has a language that can be used by domain experts who know about the data and who should be able to access what. Once this mapping is setup, the C3 middleware takes over and deploys the data on the selected IaaS providers while respecting the privacy requirement of the data. The middleware was demonstrated using a case study that was carried out with T-Systems International in Germany.

A Framework for Optimized Distribution of Tenants in Cloud Applications (CLOUD2010-3032)
Christoph Fehling, Frank Leymann, and Ralph Mietzner (University of Stuttgart Universit¨atsstr Germany)
Christoph talked about the distribution of application components amongst resources (where a resource can be infrastructure or platforms), and provided details of a framework that enables cloud providers to model their resources, users and their applications to find an optimum distribution.

Enterprise Cloud Service Architecture (CLOUD2010-3004)
Longji Tang, Jing Dong, Yajing Zhao, and Liang-Jie Zhang (University of Texas at Dallas IBM T.J. Watson Research Center,USA)
Longji talked about enterprise cloud services architecture, I didn’t quite understand why an enterprise would want to do this.

Towards Living Landscape Models: Automated Integration of Infrastructure Cloud in Enterprise Architecture Management (CLOUD2010-3005)
Matthias Farwick, Berthold Agreiter, Ruth Breu, Matthias Häring, Karsten Voges, and Inge Hanschke (University of Innsbruck, Austria, iteratec GmbHMunich, Germany)
Matthias talked about the problems of keeping enterprise architecture models of an enterprise’s IT infrastructure up to date and in-sync with their actual setup. Their aim is to keep the EA models in-sync and support enterprises to transition from an as-is model to a to-be model of their IT infrastructure. Currently EA models are created manually using information from project documentation and interviews, and it becomes challenging to keep these models up to date when IaaS is used as things can be easily changed. Matthias et al have started work on a tool that automatically queries virtual machines and their applications in order to keep the EA models up to date.

A Review of Cloud Business Models and Sustainability (CLOUD2010-3006)
Victor Chang, Gary Wills, and David De Roure(University of Southampton, UK)
Victor talked about the different business models that cloud providers use to make money.

Panel 1: Cloud Computing Standards
This panel included Wu Chou (Avaya Labs), David Bernstein (Huawei Ltd), James Wendorf (IEEE), Billy Cox (Intel), Don lee (NIST), and Alexander (IEEE). Each panelist gave a short talk about their thoughts on standards in cloud computing – they all agreed that standards were important and required. There are currently 12 organizations who are working on standards in cloud computing, they include CSA, NIST, OGF, Open Cloud Consortium, SNIA, Cloud Working Group, and the ITU focus group on CC. It was interesting to hear one of the panelists highlight the non-technical challenges of cloud adoption as being physiological as humans don’t always make rational decisions. He suggested that standards and legislation will help as they provide the stamp of approval for IT decision makers.

Keynote: Cloud Computing in an Outcome Centric World by Chung-Sheng Li (IBM T.J. Watson)
An interesting view of how more and more businesses are using services and only paying for them when they feel that they have achieved the outcome that they wanted. I guess measuring the value of different outcomes is the main challenge here as each business has some unique requirements from its IT systems.