A quick post to say a very warm welcome to IMI Tech Talk / KFNX listeners!

I was recently approached to take part in an interview about Cloud Computing and Security on IMI Tech Talk, broadcast on KFNX News Talk Radio.  KFNX is a US based radio station based out of Phoenix, Arizona.  More in-depth than the previous opportunity, a range of Cloud Computing technologies were discussed in the 30 minute segment:

• Who am I?
• What is cloud computing? (*that* question!).
• Introduction to virtualization.
• Examples of cloud computing services that exist today.
• Barriers to entry.
• Security issues of processing or storing data in the cloud
• cloudsecurity.org

I did mention I would provide links to useful Cloud Computing resources (as my mind went totally blank during the interview!) - watch for a post next week covering the blogs I read regularly.

Cloudsecurity.org was born as I couldn’t find any dedicated web resource discussing Cloud Computing and Security.  If there are subjects you want to see covered, feel free to leave a suggestion in the Skribit sidebar to the right.

I do welcome comments in response to blog posts on the blog itself - don’t be shy :-).

For private communications I can be reached at craig.balding@gmail.com.

My thanks to the IMI Tech Talk team, particularly Tom and Eric.

Enjoy the blog,

Craig

The “More” Part of CEP over ESP is Far from Mature

By Changhai Ke, ILOG

An EDA and CEP must be understood as 2 different areas. EDA is an architecture pattern for enterprise applications. The components are loosely coupled by the use of events. In its strict sense, this is more an architecture pattern than an algorithm.

CEP, on the other hand, targets at the event processing and pattern recognition level. For me, it’s the research for the right algorithm to use to recognize the situations. Pattern recognition, event correlation are all good characterizations for CEP. Back 15 years ago, the alarm correlation in the telecom area was done using production rules (it is still the case), and this perfectly falls into the CEP area.

In fact, EDA comes after CEP, but the CEP at that period was not explicitly called CEP. The nature of their respective study is not the same, one is at the architecture and middleware level, the other is at the algorithm side. As both are concerned by events, it seems that people more or less implicitly include CEP in EDA, mix the two and introduce confusion. Why not. But it’s important to understand that CEP (on its algorithm side) could mature on its way without being worried about the event transportation layer.

As a system, CEP needs input events for processing. If EDA is considered as the only way to bring and transport events to the CEP systems, then of course CEP won’t become successful without the prior success of EDA. But in my understanding, CEP targets some real-time or close to real-time applications, and the event transport layer in those applications are the most often ad-hoc and over-optimized. I fear that EDA has the same kind of performance goal.

Another distinction needs to be made. CEP is more general than ESP (event stream processing), characterized by an EPL for data aggregation with notifications. Even on the market most of the CEP vendors provide EPL languages, CEP has the vocation to cover more than that. The “more” part is not well defined, at least it should include the event correlation, and correlation is not just data aggregation.

The ESP part of CEP could be considered as quite mature. There are so many EPL languages, and tuning has been made on the runtime side. It seems also that some applications based on ESP have proved to work. But the “more” part of CEP over ESP is far from mature. It is often described that CEP could use several technologies, such as statistical models, Bayesian network, time series, rules, etc. I agree that there are a few systems using rules. But where are the others?

Sincerely,

Changhai Ke