David Bernstein

Intercloud Directory and Exchange Protocol Detail Using XMPP and RDF

Working groups have proposed building a layered set of protocols to solve the Cloud Computing interoperability challenge called “Intercloud Protocols”. Instead of each cloud provider establishing connectivity with another cloud provider in a Point-to-Point manner resulting in the n2 complexity problem, Intercloud Directories and Exchanges will act as mediators for enabling connectivity and collaboration among disparate cloud providers. Point to Point protocols such as HTTP are not suitable beyond 1-to-1 models, therefore the discussions around many-to-many mechanisms have been proposed, including XMPP. This paper details the use of an XMPP mechanism for such mediation. On top of that, for the federation of the resources themselves, we define a resources catalog approach, using the Semantic Web Resource Definition Framework (RDF) along with a common Ontology of Cloud Computing Resources to work across a variety of heterogeneous cloud providers.

Intercloud Security Considerations

Cloud computing is a new design pattern for large, distributed data centers. Service providers offering applications including search, email, and social networks have pioneered this specific to their application. Recently they have expanded offerings to include compute-related capabilities such as virtual machines, storage, and complete operating system services. The cloud computing design yields breakthroughs in geographical distribution, resource utilization efficiency, and infrastructure automation. These “public clouds” have been replicated by IT vendors for corporations to build “private clouds” of their own. Public and private clouds offer their end consumers a “pay as you go” model - a powerful shift for computing, towards a utility model like the electricity system, the telephone system, or more recently the Internet. However, unlike those utilities, clouds cannot yet federate and interoperate. Such federation is called the “Intercloud”. Building the Intercloud is more than technical protocols. Ablueprint for an Intercloud economy must bearchitected with a technically sound foundation and topology. As part of the overall Intercloud Topology, this paper builds on the technology foundation emerging for the Intercloud and specifically delves into details of Intercloud security considerations such as Trust Model, Identity and Access Management, governance considerations and so on.

A Cloud PAAS for High Scale, Function, and Velocity Mobile Applications - With Reference Application as the Fully Connected Car

Cloud Computing is a term applied to large, hosted datacenters, usually geographically distributed, which offer various computational services on a “utility” basis. Clouds are most often serving Developers or Businesses, or Large Enterprises as a new way to host applications. These applications are usually delivered to client PC’s or PC-like smart phones. We consider the case where the clients are highly mobile, very interactive, and very functional, such as in a car. The car is in and of itself a rich, three screen client (Phone-like, Television-like, Computer-like) which can host complicated application scenarios, with some logic in the car, and other logic “in the Cloud”. Additionally, the car can represent a collection of next generation sensors eventing up to the cloud. We explored the resultant needed capabilities of such a cloud, and concluded that a very rich Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) Cloud Computing platform, far beyond the capabilities of today’s PaaS system, would be required to support such a large collection of mobile devices. We have generated an architecture for this platform from collecting requirements from several Connected Car applications, and are now modeling the results simulating millions of cars on the road per country. The PaaS system emerged with different mechanisms to other PaaS systems in existence.

New Instructional Models for Building Effective Curricula on Cloud Computing Technologies and Engineering

This paper presents ongoing work to develop advanced education and training course on the Cloud Computing technologies foundation and engineering by a cooperating group of universities and the professional education partners. The central part of proposed approach is the Common Body of Knowledge in Cloud Computing (CBK-CC) that defines the professional level of knowledge in the selected domain and allows consistent curricula structuring and profiling. The paper presents the structure of the course and explains the principles used for developing course materials, such as Blooms Taxonomy applied for technical education, and andragogy instructional model for professional education and training. The paper explains the importance of using the strong technical foundation to build the course materials that can address interests of different categories of stakeholders and roles/responsibilities in the Cloud Computing services provisioning and operation. The paper provides a short description of summary of the used Cloud Computing related architecture concepts and models that allow consistent mapping between CBK-CC, stakeholder roles/responsibilities and required skills, explaining also importance of the requirements engineering stage that provides a context for cloud based services design. The paper refers to the ongoing development of the educational course on Cloud Computing at the University of Amsterdam, University of Stavanger and provides suggestions for building advanced online training course for IT professionals.

Intercloud federation using via semantic resource federation API and dynamic SDN provisioning

Intercloud refers to a transparent and voluntary federation of Computing Clouds analogous to the way the Global Internet or Global PSTN/Mobile Telephony works. Individual Service Providers join into a predefined Common Channel Signaling network (Backbone IP Routing protocols in the case of the Internet, the SS7/IN network in the case of the PSTN/Mobile Telephony Network) and exchange infrastructure. Once federation relationships are identified through protocols which transit the Signaling network, a Bearer network relationship is established where the user data is transited. This paper describes the workings of the Intercloud system in terms of the details of the Intercloud Federation API, which transits the signaling network, and how this API is used to dynamically provision a Software Defined Network (SDN) based Virtual Private Cloud (VPC) using Virtual Private networks (VPN), creating the federating bearer network for the transparent federation. The Intercloud Federation API is based on a semantic definition of resources, Service Level Agreements (SLA), and Bearer Network Provisioning Metadata.