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
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
Taking it to the Cloud!
So a large amount of vapour has passed under the bridge since my last post. As is always the case, good intentions are always overtaken by necessity, especially on Friday night! However, this week I am faced with a lengthy wait here at Heathrow's T5, not all the fault of the incumbent airline, but nevertheless, I am sitting here with some time to spare and so here goes!
In recent weeks I have attended several conferences, including ICT 2008, the European Commission's big research and development event in Lyon, City#Grid in London's Canary Wharf, one of the premier computing conferences for Financial Services, and other conferences more closely related to my day job in Knowledge Transfer, Innovate '08; IDC's Green IT, etc.. A couple of things which have been dominating recent discussions in the industry at all these venues. The Cloud! It seems that the developments in IT as a Service are beginning to really capture people's attention, there are challenges, but the recent economic downturn is again turning people's heads towards cost cutting activities and what sounds better than replacing agening equipment with shiny new objects in ths cloud? Well it's not as simple as that, but wait there is help at hand!
On January 14th and 15th, one of the projects with which I am associated,
OGF-Europe, is holding an event called
Cloudscape, A Workshop Exploring Cloud Computing and its Impact on Enterprise IT , in Brussels. This is a programme which has been put together by our Industry Expert Group, to bring focus on the developments in the atmosphere and allow for some genuine engagement between practitioners from both sides of the cloud. Chaired by Microsoft's Fabrizio Gagliardi, the conference will feature speakers such as Paul Strong from e-Bay and Kyriakos Baxevanidis, Acting Head of Unit Géant & eInfrastructures unit European Commission. Among several prestigious contributors. My colleagues from the Open Grid Forum (
OGF), a distributed computing standards community, another organisation with which I now have strong links, will also be in town and we hope for an healthy exchange of ideas and experience with which to start the new year. If you are interested please register for the event
here.
And for those wishing to bundle their trips together, the SSOKOU '09 conference is also being held in Brussels immediately preceding the Cloudscape event. This event is all about the future of services and knowledge utilities. Its being run by the European Community for Software and Services. Register
here. Perhaps I'll see you there?
Ian
Labels: Cloudscape, OGF, OGF-Europe, SSOKOU '09
Barcelona, Grids and the Cloud
This week is
OGF 23 in Barcelona, a global grid community gathering in support of the agenda of grid standards and adoption in the scientific and business communities. The event is also shared with
BEinGrid, an European initiative to demonstrate business relevance of grid, and the launch of
OGF-EU, an European FP7 project aimed at championing the standards cause and European contributions to the development of grid. I'm pleased to say that my employer is supporting OGF-EU as well as my continued stewardship of the
Grid Computing Now! Knowledge Transfer Network.
So what's the buzz, we're two days into the event and a pattern has emerged, right? Well, yes, it has. Simultaenously, we are told that Grid is not being adopted as expected and that Cloud is the answer. We also had an interesting debate following Werner Vogels excellent keynote speech, he's Amazon's CTO, about whether the "cloud" is in the grid or the grid is in the "cloud"!
There are grains of truth in all of these propositions:-
Firstly, grid is not likely to be widespread in its implementation as a technology. Its proposition is that you are able to distribute your applications to operate in parallel in an heterogeneous compute environment, within and possibly, without your organisation boundaries. This of course requires some form of restructuring of applications previously written with specific hardware configurations in mind. Not a likely course of action for most understaffed (in capability and numbers) IT departments. Without doing this the application cannot take advantage of a grid infrastructure. In addition, configuring grid infrastructures to support transaction processing is in its early days, outside those experts in the major application suite suppliers and leading web service providers, all of whom are building their applications to distributed infrastructure architectures. So, the likely range of adopters is limited.
Secondly, cloud is the next big thing and a sexy concept to discuss. The reality is that the leaders in the cloud service provision industry, which certainly includes but is not limited to Amazon with its Web Services, are simply dipping their toes in the water with large scale commodity infrastructures leveraged from their understanding of the their own e-commerce business models. Remember that the likes of Amazon and e-Bay already operate huge e-commerce infrastructures and literally service millions of suppliers, drawn by the lure of customers! However, looking forwards, the scale of infrastructures being built by these leaders and Google and Microsoft and ... is truly gigantic, often environmentally efficient - in a way that those with data centres in the centre of big cities really can't compete with, and they have the capacity to support many customers before they start to sweat on further investment. The rub is that they have invested in low technology commodity hardware and high technology competitive management practices to deliver resilience and efficient operation - all in the name of keeping the cost of services low - and much lower than the owned data centre!
But you say, doesn't security floor this proposition? Yes it does, but not the way you may think. Its governmental and industrial regulation which is providing obstacles to storage of data on non-dmoestic infrastructures; or an audit trail which forces the trading company to invest in masses of expensive, redundant on-line storage. Perhaps there'll be a white knight government or sector who will look again at these restrictions and the added costs they incur.
Finally, to the Grid in the Cloud or Cloud in the Grid debate? Firstly, who cares? It is a trusim that grid computing technologies are at the heart of all of the new "cloud" infrastructures. Its also true that people can implement grid, which means installing and running middleware in cloud instances to form a virtual grid. So you tell me which came first, the grid or the cloud!
The bottom line of all this? What price the owned data centre of the future. Is it possible that wholesale change will impact the enterprise data centre as CFOs struggle to reconcile a cost m odel which is 10x that of the leading cloud service providers? Who else will be there? Well, the telco's are looking at network service provision with an eager eye. The Big tin vendors are increasingly being pushed down the path of adopting large scale customer infrastructures. Where might they make their profit? In the Cloud!
Labels: Amazon, Cloud, Grid Computing Now, OGF
