Ignacio M. Llorente and I presented the Cloud Technologies Chapter status and objectives at the II Morfeo General Assembly on 26 March 2009. At this session, Cloud Technologies were presented as key for Future Internet of Services.

There is the opportunity on creating an European Interest Group on Cloud starting with an high-qualified Spanish seed: the chapter founders (DSA-Research Group from UCM and Telefónica I+D), and other organizations that have shown interest in becoming members (BSC, CESGA, Atos Origin, Catón, EyeOS and Xeridia). Everyone with expertise in service and infrastructure management, and sharing our common view of creating an Open Source Cloud Platform, is invited to collaborate within the chapter.

Therefore, Cloud Technologies Chapter objectives are:

• To create an Open Source Cloud Platform integrating existing and new components following a common cloud architecture view
• To promote the creation of R&D&i project proposals aligned with the Chapter’s Architecture view
• To lead the creation of an European Cloud Open Alliance to integrate an Open Source Reference Implementation of a cloud platform for Future Internet of Services
  • Aligned with NEXOF-RA (NESSI Service Open Framework-Reference Architecture)
  • Integrating FP7 and other R&D programs’ results

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Amazon Web Services (AWS) recently started offering customers the opportunity to reserve capacity in advance on its Elastic Compute Cloud infrastructure. Once the deployment is started after the reservation lease is started, if the users find they need more resources than those initially reserved, they can add more capacity via the on-demand model and pay for that as needed.

Service provisioning  in clouds is very challenging for the immediate provisioning only model. Advance reservation allows service providers to ensure the actual provisioning of  the service under determined policies or time constraints. At the same time, it allows c cloud providers to make a better management of their local infrastructure, since they know their future needs in advance. Advance reservation is also required for the sync of the  co-allocation of service components across different cloud providers in a federated environment.

The novelty of this approach is not that much. Some time ago, some well-known projects of this blog already implemented this capability. OpenNebula plus the Haizaea lease manager allows resource providers to lease their resources, using potentially complex lease terms, instead of only allowing users to request VMs that must start immediately. Most likely, other VM management solutions and cloud providers like Flexiscale or ElasticHost which still use use immediate allocation, will be including advance reservation very soon.

It seems that some of the “old -fashioned” grid ideas are coming back to life in the form of a Cloud reincarnation. Thus, the shift of experience from grid technologies into cloud technologies seems to continue.

IT systems are supposed to make companies more modular and flexible. With the Cloud, it will become easier to outsource business processes, or at least those parts of them where firms do not enjoy a competitive advantage. Companies will increasingly focus on their “core” and shed the “context”.This also means that companies will rely more on services provided by others. They will increasingly form “process networks” to put together customized supply chains for specific business.

Both trends could mean that in future huge clouds—which might be called “industry operating systems”—will provide basic services for a particular sector, for instance finance or logistics. On top of these systems will sit many specialised and interconnected firms, just like applications on a computing platform.

Yet this is only half the story. The cloud changes not only the plumbing and structure of firms and industries, known as the “transactional layer”, but also their “interactional layer” where all the interactions between people take place, both within an organisation and with its business partners.

Source: The Economist-  The Long Nimbus

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