European Digital Agenda: From Cloud-friendly to Cloud-active

Yesterday we participated in the second edition of the cloud computing workshop within the Digital Agenda Assembly 2012 aimed at defining the European Cloud Computing Strategy. Last year, 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. This edition has mainly focused on policy issues to coordinate cloud computing in Europe, international aspects of cloud, and key areas in contract terms, such as data preservation after termination of the contract, data integrity and disclosure. 

The agenda, presentations and recommendations are available at the Digital Agenda web site.

OpenNebula Cloud for HPC at NASA Ames

"Cloud Computing Architecture with Open Nebula – HPC Cloud Use Cases" is the title of the invited talk that I gave yesterday at the NASA Advanced Supercomputing Division – NASA Ames. I provided an overview of cloud computing architecture with OpenNebula, with special focus on cloud deployments for High Performance Computing environments. You can find bellow the slides and the abstract of the presentation. It was a great opportunity to interact with Piyush Mehrotra's group in the Computational Technologies Branch to discuss how OpenNebula can address their needs, and to talk with some of the people involved in the Nebula Project. Thanks for the invitation!.

Cloud Computing Architecture with Open Nebula - HPC Cloud Use Cases - NASA Ames 2012

OpenNebula is a fully open-source cloud management platform, with excellent performance and scalability to manage tens of thousands of virtual machines, and with the most advanced functionality for building virtualized enterprise data centers and private cloud infrastructures. OpenNebula is the result of many years of research and development in efficient and scalable management of virtual machines on large-scale distributed infrastructures. Its innovative features have been developed to address the requirements of business use cases from leading companies in the context of flagship international projects in cloud computing. OpenNebula is being used by many supercomputing and leading research centers to build HPC and science clouds for hosting virtualized computational environments, such as batch farms and computing clusters, or for providing users with new “HPC as a service” resource provisioning models. The talk describes how to design a cloud architecture with OpenNebula and its innovative features to enable the execution of flexible and elastic cluster and high performance computing services on demand while reducing the associated cost of building the datacenter infrastructure.

Advances in Clouds - Research in Future Cloud Computing

It has been more than two years since the European Commission published in January 2010 its pioneering report about the Future of Cloud Computing. A group of experts was established with the aim to evaluate the state-of-the-art and develop future research directions in cloud computing. Since then, there has been considerable advances in the field, developments have closed some gaps that were identified in this report, but more challenges have emerged.

We were re-convened by the European Commission in 2011 in order to capture these changes and maintain a state-of-the-art view on cloud computing technologies, its position in and its relevance for Europe. The experts, led by Keith Jeffery, Lutz Schubert and Maria Tsakali, have produced a final version of this report entitled Advances in Clouds - Research in Future Cloud Computing. The report brings valuable information for people defining Cloud Computing strategies, developing innovative research lines, or exploring emerging market opportunities beyond today’s Clouds. It is a must-read.

Roadmap on Infrastructures for e-Science in Europe

The last version of the Roadmap on Distributed Computing Infrastructure for e-Science and Beyond in Europe was released last week by the SIENA initiative. The main open-source cloud computing projects, like OpenNebula, and standards bodies, like DMTF, OASIS, OGF, ETSI, and SNIA, have contributed to this roadmap that assesses the situation, identifies issues, and makes recommendations regarding the adoption and evolution of open standards-based interoperable grid and cloud computing infrastructure (e-infrastructure) or to support research in Europe.

As member of its Editorial Board, I recommend to use this roadmap as a reference of the work in cloud standards being developed by the large number of standards bodies and other collaborative groups. I hope this roadmap is a first step to achieve a closer collaboration between them to avoid the existing situation where different working groups are covering the same functionality and needs. As it was pointed out in the Workshop Towards a Cloud Computing Strategy for Europe: Matching Supply and Demand organized at the 1st Digital Agenda Assembly, one of the main barriers to cloud computing adoption is interoperability and portability across cloud providers and products. This is needed to avoid vendor lock-in and create a healthy competitive cloud computing market in Europe.

The roadmap was presented at Cloudscape IV Advances in Interoperability and Cloud Computing Standards, the 23rd of February in Brussels, including presentations from key stakeholders. One very interesting conclusion of the workshop is how open-source is driving forward development and adoption of standards in cloud computing. Most of the initiatives in research infrastructures that were presented during the event are using OpenNebula as vendor-agnostic open platform for building and managing their cloud, and its interfaces are evolving into the standard in this area.

Key Challenges in Cloud Computing to Enable Future Internet of Things

"Key Challenges in Cloud Computing to Enable Future Internet of Things" is the title of the talk about future Internet of Things that I gave today January 19th at The 4th EU-Japan Symposium on New Generation Networks and Future Internet. The talk provides an architectural view of Internet of Things from the perspective of cloud computing, defines its main requirements for the underlying processing infrastructure, and describes the challenges in cloud computing that should be addressed to meet these requirements. The talk concludes with the description of the instruments that should be used to maximize the value of research and to support the collaboration between Japan and the European Union, namely openness, standards, coordination with running initiatives, and code re-use.

Industry Recommendations and Consultation Process to the European Cloud Strategy

The European Commission opened a consultation process in May 2011 to collect the opinions of individuals, businesses and public bodies across the continent, prior to the release of a European Cloud Computing Strategy in 2012. The online consultation closed in September, and the Commission has recently made public a report with its main results. Regarding innovation, respondents broadly agreed on the need for future research to improve current cloud computing commercial offerings.

A select industry group has prepared a report with key recommendations to the European Commission on the orientation of a Cloud computing strategy for Europe, proposing some actions for the European Commission and industry. The report presents 10 key recommendations and proposes some actions. They cover legal framework, market and technology related recommendations and actions. Main research and innovation recommendations are to build on the past and foster collaborative research in cloud computing, and to foster interoperability and data portability in the Cloud.

More information about the development of the EU-wide strategy on Cloud Computing is available at the European Commission site.

New Canadian Cloud Best Practices Council

Recently the ‘Canadian Cloud Best Practices Council‘ has been established as an educational forum for Canada's cloud computing thought leaders and consumer advocates. The Council aims to define a strategy for how Canada can become a leader in the emerging field of Cloud Computing, and to accelerate the speed of cloud adoption and utilization in Canada.

Keynote public sector executives including Jirka Danek, CIO at Shared Services Canada and Chris Moore, CIO City of Edmonton, are joining forces with their counterparts from industry powerhouse firms Microsoft, Deloitte, OpenNebula, and others to define an agenda for cloud innovation.

A first annual Cloud Summit is taking place on March 12, 2012 in Edmonton, Alberta. The theme of the conference is “A Call to Arms – Awakening Canada’s Cloud Agenda“. The first edition of the annual conference will discuss how cloud computing technologies can be applied to achieve business transformation while mitigating proprietary barriers to entry.

This is an important step because it will provide the foundation for future business innovation. I am honored to be part of the Advisory Board of the Council and look forward to participating in the Summit, where I will try to present the critical components that, in my view, Government Strategy should incorporate to accelerate adoption of cloud computing, and the importance of open-source and standards for interoperability and innovation.