SOA-R Interest Grows

Interest continue to grow in the use of cloud computing concepts for national security missions. Although some view the idea of a "private cloud" as an oxymoron, I personally see no better way of describing what organizations like the DoD and DHS are doing. Maybe "enterprise cloud" would be a better term. What do you think?

In any case the first SOA-R event drew participation from across the industry and Government market space. Presenters included representatives from Google, IBM, Appistry, and Parabon. Attendees included representatives from The Boeing Company, Northrop Grumman Mission Systems, Booz Allen Hamilton, BAE Systems, Juniper Networks, SAIC, and many more. The event created the venue for an open forum, cross-industry discussion regarding cloud computing, SOA, and adoption and implementation by federal government and Department of Defense users. The focus of the event centered on defining cloud computing and what it means to government customers. The second event will be held on August 13th and will focus on Global Information Access. Speakers from Cisco, Appirio, and Akamai have been confirmed.

Cisco appears to be jumping into cloud computing "big time"!! I understand from some of my discussions that they have focused in on solving all the network security and provisioning issues around the use of virtual machines. This would address many of the concerns agencies now have with cloud computing. They also demonstrate the ability to assure access to the cloud in their video on radio aware routing. You will recognize Appirio's name from one of my earlier posts. Their expertise is in connecting various clouds together. Akamai is also a strong cloud computing proponent. They are arguably one of the largest information providers in the world.

Membership in the SOA-R wiki also continues to grows. Recently added documents include ACT-IAC's "Toward a Service Driven IT Infrastructure" and Gartner's "Cloud Computing Meets Data Center Realities"

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Does anybody really know what cloud computing is?

Less than 2% of the CIOs in an Infoworld survey said that cloud computing was a priority. The surveyed indicated that server virtualization and server consolidation are their No. 1 and No. 2 priorities. Following these two are cost cutting, application integration, and datacenter consolidation. At the bottom of the list of IT priorities are grid computing, open source software, content management, and cloud computing (called on-demand/utility computing in the survey).

Since cloud computing is all about virtualization and server consolidation these kind of numbers really concern me? Last week during the SOA-R education session, Bob Lozano of Appistry actually talked about how enterprises are integrating public and private clouds today in order to meet virtualization, consolidation and cost cutting goals. His full presentation is available in the SOA-R Interactive Networking Group wiki.

Elastra is also addressing this enerprise need. They are working on a version of Cloud Server for data center VMware environments, their "private clouds." The company's pitch is that IT departments need better tools to specify requirements and configure software to run on physical or virtual servers, regardless of whether the underlying systems are on premises or out in the public cloud. See John Foley's blog on Information Week in The Rise Of Enterprise-Class Cloud Computing.

Sam Charrington is even more definitive in the Open Web Developer's Journal:

"We're still relatively early in the cloud computing hype cycle but I strongly believe that in the future, most if not all server-side software applications will be deployed in a cloud-computing-like manner. That is not to say that all applications will be run in one of exactly five global clouds. On the contrary, every enterprise will have one or more 'clouds' into which they deploy applications."

CIO's should really re-think their views on cloud computing.

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SOA-R First Session Presentations Announced

The presentations for the first session of the SOA-R Educational Series sesion have just been announced:

Steven L Armentrout, PhD
President & CEO
Parabon

Grids, Clouds and Computation: Getting to Ground Truth under Mostly Cloudy Conditions

For the past decade - under the banners of distributed computing, cluster computing, grid computing and, now, cloud computing - network-centric computing architectures have evolved steadily toward the inevitable: computation delivered as an on-demand service. The economic, temporal and analytical benefits of this utility-style model are, indeed, compelling and now that secure implementations are available, Federal adoption has accelerated, albeit not as swiftly as the hype around it. This presentation will dispel many popular misconceptions about grids, clouds and computation. You will walk away with a greater understanding of the industry, as well as a checklist of considerations designed to help you effectively leverage "computation on demand."

Bob Lozano
Co-Founder & Chief Strategist
Appistry

Private Clouds: Cloud Computing for Intelligence, Defense and the Enterprise

Seemingly from nowhere, cloud computing has become one of the hottest IT topics in 2008. For many IT practitioners, cloud computing represents IT services and infrastructure delivered by providers outside the enterprise via the Internet. While this will most certainly happen, many applications within Intelligence, Defense and Commercial Enterprises must remain within the firewall. For these organizations, the true opportunity represented by Cloud Computing is not simply the outsourcing of infrastructure, but the transformative effect the Cloud model will have within the organization. Every IT shop will become a cloud computing provider in its own right, operating a Private Cloud for its own applications. Today’s stove-piped application delivery models will give way to the cloud-based models of tomorrow. The rapid adoption of virtualization in the data center is only the first step.


Todd Wiseman
Manager, Federal Enterprise
Google

Implications of cloud computing

Cloud computing or utility computing is not a new concept but is finally accelerating rapidly in today's marketplace due to a number of developments and forces. Google will demonstrate several examples of capabilities available today in the 'cloud' and where software-as-a-service is headed in the future.

Greg Boss
Cloud Infrastructure Architect
IBM

What is Cloud Computing?

This presentation will describe how the IBM HiPODS team leverages our world wide cloud centers to work closely with enterprise customers to developed best practices, workload patterns, and reusable assets for cloud computing. We will describe a high-level infrastructure framework and its underlying enablers, such as virtualization, automation, self-service portal, and monitoring. We will describe how IBM has pioneered these technologies and is using them internally in our own cloud implementation. We will also share examples of production cloud data centers that we have built for customers. Finally we will give a demonstration of a actual customer production cloud data center.

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