The end to this chapter ... Turning the page!
Dear friends, the Digital Systems KTN finishes with its funding on March 31st. At this point the story of the rise and fall of Grid Computing and the emergence of Cloud Computing can be told. From the 1st of April I will shift to a new blogging platform, just for the change, and you will already find my introductory piece
here.
I have been the Director of a KTN for 6 years and have had the privilege of working with a fine bunch of people from Malcolm Atkinson and Dave Berry at the National e-Science Centre at the University of Edinburgh, to Tara Kelly here at Intellect; Gillian Law at both NeSC and Intellect; and Mahesha Pandit here at Intellect. Along the way Mark Parsons covered our interests from EPCC also at the University of Edinburgh when Dave Berry left for service-orientated pastures anew. We have been grateful to many people in these organisations for their help as we learned how to deliver against the KTN vision, in many cases helping define it too!
We have also been grateful to colleagues from our industry, Dave Pearson, John Barr among many others, who have provided the intellectual horsepower, encouragement and support to allow our agenda to flourish and grow.
The last 2 years have been dominated by the KTN "optimisation" agenda driven by our paymasters the Technology Strategy Board, and we have successfully brought to life a Digital Systems KTN in the wake of the Grid Computing Now!, Cyber-Security and Location and Timing KTNs. It has been a pleasure to get to know Bob Cockshott and Tony Dyhouse and their colleagues at NPL and QinetiQ, as we have pulled together into a new KTN, in the full knowledge of the further change ahead. We are now merging with the Digital Communications KTN in the final stage of optimisation and my colleague Philip Hargrave and his employers the ICT KTN Co., will take over the administration of the grant from the TSB.
This leaves me free to concentrate on the task at hand, and you should read my new blog entry for more details on that. I will also have some more time to spend with my colleagues at Intellect, the UK High Technology Trade Association, too. I'm certainly looking forwards to spending more time on innovation and much less on administration!
As for the bottom line of our work, we publish the latest Annual Report for the Digital Systems KTN in the next few days and there'll be data aplenty to see there. But for the casual reader, we've successfully grown a new community of 1800, and rising, around our programme in the last year. Inheriting relatively few from our "legacy" communities. We've participated in more than 150 events, some of which were our own - but most of which enabled us to address new audiences. And we added 15 case studies to the portfolio making a total in excess of 60 available online, the vast majority of which describe successful adoption of distributed computing. I am also delighted to relate that there have been several notable successes in the adoption of distributed computing which I have had the privilege to personally witness in the past 6 years. Perhaps the most promising is
eMediaTrack, an UK based start-up, now firmly rooted in Oxford for technology development purposes, while plying its trade in Korean Government. Korea is a nation which has stated a desire to "lead" the race to the Cloud for Government computing. I know, I was there at the event they announced it!! I was also personally involved in the development of the UK G-Cloud strategy for Government computing. This story is still being written. But the ideas are of great interest within and beyond our shores.
For those of you interested in the Grid to Cloud story. I think it is safe to say that the future of distributed computing, and services, lies firmly in the Cloud. Recent announcements of Grid services available in the Cloud have possibly made this point even more definitively. Recent announcements of cloud services available from
national infrastructures also make an important point about ease of use and broad applicability of cloud based services. However, please don't be confused. Grid computing underpins the service infrastructures for all of the leading service providers. Open standards of the type being championed by OGF, are pivotal in the operation of these companies. And much of the learning from the Grid community will eventually come home to roost in Cloud services I am convinced. So with that thought I propose that we should declare victory at this point and move on to the brave new world of IT as a Service. That's my plan!
Labels: Cloud computing, Grid Computing, KTN, OGF
Government Cloud and Open Standards
On Wednesday, January 27th 2010, the UK Government announced its new
ICT Strategy for meeting the requirements of the citizen, both in delivering services for the next decade, as well as meeting the requirements to reduce public spending through consolidation and sharing services and capacity. At the heart of the strategy is a commitment to implement a Government Cloud or G-Cloud comprising a shared infrastructure and an Applications Store with which to gain access to IT services, whether automated or human, for civil servants. The vision is to encourage more effective use of resources, starting with a pilot implementation of Infrastructure as a Service, followed by Data Centre consolidation and the development and deployment of shared services across government. This can result in a substantial reduction of costs, through removing duplication of services and resources, a reduction in energy costs and a consequent reduction in carbon footprint. This is by no means the only example of a government initiative on Cloud adoption, the US led the way starting a year ago with its
Federal Cloud Computing Initiative, which comprises a similar drive to offer Infrastructure as a Service and a Storefront to allow access to shared services. The Canadian, Australian and Japanese Governments are also looking at their own offerings too.
One of the key drivers in the G-Cloud and FCCI initiatives is the development and adoption of open standards for cloud service providers encouraging the possibility of interoperability. Bob Marcus and Craig Lee,
OGF, are collaborating with others, see
cloud-standards.org, to help bring focus on this important process. This will be discussed at two forthcoming events in Europe:- 1)
CloudScape II being held in Brussels on February 22nd and 23rd; and 2)
OGF 28 being held in Munich on March 15th to 19th. There is a lot of work to do and recent developments within the OGF with the OCCI group are beginning to surface some key areas of understanding for promoting utility computing. All in all, I believe we are witnessing a significant shift towards shared infrastuctures supporting shared services and, somewhat unusually, the governments of the world are well equipped to motivate some of this innovation and thus improve services while reducing costs. Bring it on!
Labels: Cloud computing, government IT. cloud standards
The on ramp to the Cloud
So where are we on the way to the Cloud? In spite of substantial amounts of noise from media, un-conference and un-workshop activities, the reality is that true commercial use of the Cloud has been limited. It is widely recognised that the leader in the space is Amazon Web Services and that de facto, the EC2, S3 and plethora of services offered by Amazon offer the current benchmark for competitors to approach. Their announcement of new, dynamic building blocks or tools, to allow the scalability of service delivery using Cloud shifts the agenda another step forwards. See h
ttp://fountnhead.blogspot.com/2009/05/new-aws-enable-real-elastic-clouds.html for a useful summary of the changes.
Industry rumour has been working overtime on Microsoft's Azure offering and the specific services being offered to their enterprise user base, where the flexibility to offer applications as a service and/or supplemented by cloud based services is proving an attractive prospect. Equally, Google is flexing its considerable muscles to offer its Google Apps and Docs services and with possibly the largest global infrastructure of any vendor, they are well placed to extend their services in a similar vein.
However, the word on the street - or in the Data Centre, is that company data will not be disseminated outside the firewall - over the dead body of the CIO. In fact, given that most shops have ample processing power available and rapidly escalating storage needs, the need to acquire new resources outside the firewall is actually quite low. Enter the discussion about Private Cloud. One of my roles is in the global distributed standards organisation,
Open Grid Forum (OGF). In this group we are interested in identifying the building blocks of open standards which allow the end users to assure themselves of interoperation and consistency across their chosen software vendors. As the Enterprise lead for OGF, I am interested in understanding how IT users would really like to incorporate IT Services and Cloud infrastructures into their provisioning and infrastructure management tools. To that end we are running a workshop here at OGF 26 in Chapel Hill this week, which aims to start the process of understanding user requirements and use cases to flow into the OGF
Open Cloud Computing Interface (OCCI) standards activity announced in April. OCCI is certainly gaining some traction in the space,a lthough the industry leaders are not yet convinced of the benefits of open standards applied to their services - that's the challenge for the prospective users of these services to argue that it is in the best interests of their vendors to comply with their needs. However, it is early days.
Labels: Cloud computing, OCCI, OGF, User Requirements
