In a very recent post, Craig Balding, founder of cloudsecurity.org, highlights the fact that we are all concern about the security implications derived from the bunch of new and old technologies labelled as Clouds.“The problem is that there are many donkeys, and even more tails. Worse, we’re all trying to stick different tails on the same donkeys”, he claims.Indeed, he proposes security experts to join the A6 group in order to start building a common interface that allows providers to automate the Audit, Assertion, Assessment, and Assurance of their environments and allow authorized consumers of their services to do likewise via an open, extensible and secure API across SaaS, PaaS, and IaaS offerings.We believe this kind of efforts are very valuable and need strong industrial and academic support in order to become something close to a success. Success here does not come in the form of a widely used standard, but in the sense that the Cloud does not really include any disruptive technology to be afraid of with regards to its security. It is the usage we make of the combination of already existent technologies that makes the difference.From this website we will be following the progresses and contributing our two cents for such a needed API to become a reality.
The Information Technologies Institute of Valencia (ITI) organizes a technology breakfast next April 14th about “Cloud Computing: challenges and opportunities” (the event language will be Spanish). I have been invited to this event where I am going to introduce the different Cloud types (X as a Services), current technology trends through the innovation projects that Telefónica I+D is performing, and the still open challenges for Cloud adoption in the enterprise market and the opportunities for SMEs and start-ups.
Duration: 09:00-11:00h
Venue: ITI. ITI – Ciudad Politécnica de la Innovación, Universidad Politécnica de Valencia, Edificio 8G.. Valencia (Valencia)
As part of its exploitation strategy, Telefónica I+D decided to release as Open Source a number of components developed during the research on Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) Clouds. These components will be integrated in the Claudia Platform that will offer a Service Management toolkit to deploy and control the scalability of service among a public or private IaaS Cloud. Telefónica I+D chooses MORFEO Project to release the software because it guarantees the access to the results of research beyond the end of the project.
By March 2010, the first set of components, which are part of the research results of the RESERVOIR project, will be released:
- Service Lifecycle Manager that will control the deployment and dynamic scalability processes of the services.
- Scalability and Optimization Manager that will dynamically drive the configuration and scalability of the services.
- OVF Manager component, a library to parse and transform OVF files that contains the service definition.
- Service Monitoring Framework, based on the WASUP platform, will store and distribute the status of the services.
- Cloud Dashboard, based on the EzWeb mashup platform, will provide a Web GUI to manage the Cloud.
- The Service Manager Interface, an API that will allow developers to manage the deployment of their services as a whole.
- Implementation of the OCCI (Open Cloud Computing Interface) API to integrate Claudia with different Virtual Infrastructure managers.
These components will continue evolving and put into a “production” status by Telefónica I+D. Each component will be released with its own Open Source License (GPL, Apache, MPL, etc.). Telefónica I+D will also provide commercial support following a dual-license schema.
The Claudia Platform is aligned with the Morfeo’s Cloud Technologies Chapter vision of integrating a complete Open Source Stack for managing a IaaS Cloud. In this way, Claudia will be fully integrated with Open Nebula through the OCCI API as both are members of the chapter.
For more information about the Platform Architecture and other documentation, please visit our Wiki.
Juan José Hierro, CTO on Software Technologies, presented Telefónica’s vision on Cloud Technologies at the Grids, Clouds and Service Infrastructures” workshop organized by ETSI and OGF-Europe at Sophia Antipolis on last 2-3 December 2009.
In his speech, Juan José Hierro presented the vision on the evolution of cloud technologies focused in three axis:
- ICT infrastructure provisioning for hosted applications. First available Cloud Services such as Amazon or Google already allow easy auto-provisioning of ICT resources for application developers in a pay-per-use model. But It still remains a long way until application providers will not have to have specialized knowledge on execution environments administration or until convergent computing and networking that will help to commit desired SLAs.
- Transformation of Cloud into an ecosystem for developing business opportunities. Clouds tend to add a “marketplace” that will allow customers to search, select and consume applications, supporting a number of business models: pay-per-use, revenue share or advertisement based. Clouds will also support th econcept of “Mashup as a Service” that will allow end users selecting “parts” of each application, and then, combining them with other applications parts and/or telecommunications services.
- Clouds becoming a more complex programming environments, adding standard API (Application Programming Interfaces) specialized, for example, in the user context-aware access or the use of telecommunications (SMS/MMS submission, device localization, etc.).
Telefónica I+D is actively participating in leading Cloud R&D projects: RESERVOIR (FP7) and NUBA (Spanish Plan Avanz@) for evolution of hosting, 4WARD (FP7) and IRMOS (FP7) for network virtualization and QoS, and EzWeb (Plan Avanz@) for “Mashup as a Service” concepts.
The presentation slides are available here.
 |
Organised by OGF-Europe Project and its Industry Expert Group (IEG), the workshop will focus on the need of standards to ensure that solutions and applications which are deployed today can be used tomorrow while avoiding vendor lock-in to ensure freedom of choice based on cost versus performance.
Cloudscape delivers important insights into the current and future cloud computing landscape in Europe with interoperability for innovation in commercial and research settings firmly mind. An expert group of enterprise members, researchers, policy makers, EC representatives and analyst will offer focused discussion on the board set of technologies and solutions that fall under the umbrella term of Cloud and Distributed Computing. Peruse the current agenda. |
Registration is free of charge. Places are limited.
Venue: Hilton Brussels Hotel, Brussels Belgium