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

Read the rest of this entry »

We are witnessing a new technology race about the definition  APIs to access to IaaS Cloud services. With this post series, we would like to start a review series of the most relevant specifications trying to to analyse their status outstanding aspects  of them.

We are starting this analysis with two initiatives that follows different specification models: VMware’s vCloud in a vendor-driven model (aiming to be the “de facto” standard), and OGF’s OCCI in a open standardization body-driven model.

vCloud is an initiative led by VMware and counts with the collaboration of more than 100 partner including  BT, Rackspace, SAVVIS, Sungard, T-Systems and Verizon Business. The main aim of vCloud is to provide a complete solution to deliver enterprise cloud services based on VMware technologies. The vCloud API will allow application providers to deploy their application among a cloud service provided by one of the vCloud partners.

The OGF’s OCCI (Open Cloud Computing Initiative) Working Group is aiming to deliver an API specification for remote management of cloud computing IaaS.  The proliferation of IaaS providers with their own APIs (Amazon AWS, GoGrid, Flexiscale, …) requires an standardization effort on defining an common API to avoid vendor-locking and to guarantee interoperability.