Cloud Innovation at Cloud Day 2011

Last Wednesday I had the pleasure to give a keynote about Challenges in Hybrid and Federated Cloud Computing at the first annual Cloud Day in Kista. The annual Cloud Days in Kista featured leading international and Swedish experts from industry and academia, who presented the cutting edge of cloud computing technologies. My presentation focused on how federated and hybrid clouds will play a significant role in IT strategies and e-infrastructures in the coming years, the different hybrid cloud computing scenarios, and the existing challenges for interoperability.

Organized by the Swedish Institute of Computer Science, the PDC Center for High Performance Computing, and the European Institute of Innovation and Technology under the enthusiastic leadership of Ake Edlund and Seif Haridi, the successful event also included keynotes by Michael Franklin (UC Berkeley) and Peter S Magnusson (Google). All the presentations are available for download.

Results of the Workshop Towards a Cloud Computing Strategy for Europe

The European Commission has published the results of the Workshop Towards a Cloud Computing Strategy for Europe: Matching Supply and Demand organized at the 1st Digital Agenda Assembly. The aim of the workshop was to identify the main elements of a European cloud strategy and the possible need for public-policy intervention, considering demand and supply side concerns. The results include two reports and one video. One of the reports is the below slide with the summary of the workshop presented in the plenary session. The second report is a more complete description of its purpose, context, discussions, actions and future steps.


The video is a very short interview with me, as speaker at the workshop, describing the challenges identified and the actions to address them.

The following is a transcript of that interview.

Cloud Computing will play a major role in tomorrow’s economy, first as innovation platform to increase productivity and competitiveness, and secondly as a new service industry that will provide many opportunities for European ICT companies. The workshop has helped identify the main areas of a European Cloud Strategy both to boost adoption of cloud computing and to lead cloud computing research and innovation. The workshop consisted of three different panels.

• The first panel has identified the different aspects that should be addressed to ensure that Europe can play a leading and active role both in using and in enabling cloud computing
• The second panel has explored the different opportunities for innovation and research to help create better clouds and to accelerate its adoption
• The third panel has discussed the needs of standards for interoperability, including a legal framework for international data protection and privacy

Challenges in Hybrid and Federated Cloud Computing

"Challenges in Hybrid and Federated Cloud Computing" is the title of the keynote about the future of cloud computing that I am giving tomorrow July 7th at HPCS2011 and on the 31th of August at ParCo2011. The keynote describes the different cloud federation scenarios, ranging from a federation built on commercial cloud providers that offer no real support for federation to one built on data centers of the same organization where the sites are completely dedicated to supporting all aspects of federation. The level of federation is defined based on the amount of information disclosed and how much control over the resources is provided across sites. The keynote also presents the existing challenges for interoperability in federated and hybrid cloud computing scenarios, and ends with real-life examples of multi-cloud environments running OpenNebula.

Would be great to meet you at these venues!.

View more presentations from Ignacio M. Llorente.

A View of the Challenges, Opportunities and Innovation Potential of Cloud Computing for the European Cloud Strategy

Unleashing the Potential for Innovation of Cloud Computing is the title of the presentation that I will give in the workshop Towards a Cloud Computing Strategy for Europe: Matching Supply and Demand at the 1st Digital Agenda Assembly next Friday, June 17th. The aim of the workshop is to help identify the main elements of a European Cloud Strategy. As pointed out by Rainer Zimmermann, DG INFSO, Head of unit: Software & Service Architectures and Infrastructures, The impact of cloud technologies goes beyond reducing IT costs and improving business efficiency. Companies of all sizes and government institutions will achieve new levels of productivity and innovation.

In the presentation, which is available online at the workshop site, I introduce the key challenges and gaps to be addressed in order to accelerate the adoption of cloud computing and so to unleash its full potential for innovation, contributing to increase the competitiveness and productivity of the European economy. For each gap I briefly describe the issues that, in my view, European Commission funding should address to help bridge such gap. The presentation mostly focuses on the technology challenges by elaborating on the open research issues on cloud computing that should be addressed to create better clouds, the importance on innovation-focused research to be cloud-active, and the opportunities for the ICT industry in this new service industry. OpenNebula is also described as European success story in cloud computing research and innovation. Finally open-source is presented as a model for innovation and as a vehicle to bring open interoperable cloud computing to the European industry.

Europe should play a leading role not only in using cloud computing and leveraging its full potential to foster innovation, but also in proving the enabling components to build better cloud solutions. I am firmly convinced that both represent the main opportunities for the European ICT industry.

Hope to see you there!.

A Strategic Framework for Cloud Migration

I am often asked about the steps to be taken and the issues to be considered for a successful migration to cloud computing. There is no magic formula to it, the specific steps will depend on your internal structure, industry and differentiation in the market. As general framework, I usually recommend the Decision Framework for Cloud Migration described in the Federal Cloud Computing Strategy together with a thorough study and comparison of cloud providers tailored to your needs and requirements. The three main guidelines would be:

• Shifting from Infrastructure to Service Management. This is a shift in mindset of the IT staff. We should be able to define our needs in terms of services (applications) and their expected quality of service. IT staff usually express their needs and requirements using infrastructure terms, I need 4 physical boxes to run the web server for a new site. However needs should be described in terms of service elasticity rules, this is in terms of service level objectives using key performance indicators, In order to ensure an optimal quality of service, I need to automatically scale the number of servers when the average CPU utilization of the running web servers exceeds a given threshold.
• Prioritizing Services that Are Best Suited for Migration. This prioritization should be performed according to its readiness to be executed on cloud; its affinity to the cloud model in terms of security, performance, relevance and duration; and the expected gain in terms of costs, performance, quality, agility, and innovation.
• Selecting the Best Cloud Provider. This selection is critical if we consider that given the current lack of interoperability and portability, the change to other provider in the future may be time-consuming and expensive. Besides the Price-Performance-Reliability metric, the following aspects should be considered: data protection, privacy and regulatory issues; support for business continuity; and level of control exposed to users. You could also conclude that best solution is to use different providers for different workloads.

These three guidelines constitute a very simple model to support organizations in adopting cloud computing. I will elaborate on each one shortly.

Key Research Challenges in Cloud Computing

I am writing this post to summarize the research challenges that, in my view, need to be tackled to realize the full potential of Cloud Computing. These are the open research issues on cloud computing that should be addressed to create better clouds and so to bridge the existing technology gap in order to foster the adoption of cloud computing.

This is an extract from a post that I wrote in the DSA-Research's blog to describe a keynote at the 3rd EU-Japan Symposium on Future Internet and New Generation Networks.

Cloud Aggregation. Research challenges in the aggregation of resources from diverse cloud providers adding additional layers of service management.

• Novel architectural models for aggregation of cloud providers
• Brokering algorithms for high availability, performance, proximity, legal domains, price, or energy efficiency
• Sharing of resources between cloud providers
• Networking in the deployment of services across multiple cloud providers
• SLA negotiation and management between cloud providers
• Additional privacy, security and trust management layers atop providers
• Support of context-aware applications
• Automatic management of service elasticity

Cloud Management. Research challenges in delivering infrastructure resources on-demand in a multi-tenant, secure, elastic and scalable environment.

• Scalable management of network, computing and storage capacity
• Scalable orchestration of virtualized resources and data
• Placement optimization algorithms for energy efficiency, load balancing, high availability and QoS
• Accounting, billing, monitoring and pricing models
• Security, privacy and trust issues in the cloud
• Energy efficiency models, metrics and tools at system and datacenter levels

Cloud Enablement. Research challenges in enhancing platform infrastructure to support cloud management requirements.

• Technologies for virtualization of infrastructure resources
• Virtualization of high performance infrastructure components
• Autonomic and intelligent management of resources
• Implications of Cloud paradigm on networking and storage systems
• Support for vertical elasticity
• Provision of service related metrics

Cloud Interoperability. Challenges to ensure that the available cloud services can work together and interoperate successfully.

• Common and standard interfaces for cloud computing
• Portability of virtual appliances across diverse clouds providers

SIENA European Roadmap on Grid and Cloud Standards for e-Science and Beyond

This is the third, and last (for the moment), report that I would like to recommend. It nicely complements the other two reports (The Future of Cloud Computing and Priorities to Advance Cloud Computing). SIENA European Roadmap on Grid and Cloud Standards for e-Science and Beyond addresses requirements, technologies, and interoperability and standards for e-infrastructure. I am part of the Editorial Board of this roadmap that in this first version includes use cases and position papers collected for the Cloudscape III event.

Cloudscape III – Driving Europe’s Cloud computing Strategy - took place on the 15 and 16 of March in Brussels offering the perfect opportunity for experts, developers and end-users in the cloud computing space to become part of the cloud standards process. The event, hosted by the EC-funded SIENA initiative, brought a 360° overview on the Cloud computing landscape, covering benefits for enterprise, research and government alongside challenges spanning scalability, data movement, ownership and privacy, security and legal issues, openness and interoperability.