Defining Cloud Computing

Cloud computing is a very active community. The Google Group gets 600 posts per month and many bloggers are covering the space. However, “cloud computing” is impossible to define in a way that satisfies everyone (or even most). Cloud computing is not alone in this controversy, consider the definition and meaning of “Web 2.0″, “mashups” or “RESTful architecture”. All of these terms are relatively recent. According to Google Trends, these terms became popular to the general public sometime between 2005 and 2007:

• Web 2.0 - often confused with RIA, AKA Social Computing, Long-Tail Apps, Crowdware (2005 by O’Reilly Media)
• Mashup - made popular by Google Maps, AKA Composite/Situational Apps. (2005)
• REST - Has a strict definition, but many don’t understand it and abuse the term. (2006 by R. Fielding)
• Cloud computing - collides with many other terms, such as SaaS, Grid, Utility, PaaS, etc. (2007)

The definition of cloud computing is in progress:

There’s a Darwinian evolution of the exact definition of cloud computing running around. We’re about a country mile away from “knowing when I see it”, which is excellent progress. The cloud to everyone’s silver-lining has enough material to write a 3 volume desktop reference at this point. - Michael Cote, June 2008

Definition #1 - “Cloud computing is the realisation of Internet (”Cloud”) based development and use of computer technology (”Computing”) delivered by an ecosystem of providers. - Sam Johnston, July 2008

Definition #2 - “Cloud computing = network computing. I love the idea of cloud computing, the next evolution of the most network intensive architecture possible, but one that if it works well, is transparent. It’s all about the transparency.” - Douglas Gourlay, Cisco, May 2008

Definition #3 - “There seems to be a group myopia around so-called “cloud computing” and its definitions. What we’re really talking about are “cloud services” of which, “computing” is only a subset…Cloud services are not SaaS. They are far more akin to web services…” - Randy Bias, neoTactics, May 2008

(Anti-)Definition #4 - “Note that I refer to cloud services, not to the could. I am not interested in defining cloud as a term, because I don’t think it’s very useful. For those of us in the distributed computing’s pace

The Working Definition (Winner!):

“…the notion of providing easily accessible compute and storage resources on a pay-as-you-go, on-demand basis, from a virtually infinite infrastructure managed by someone else. As a customer, you don’t know where the resources are, and for the most part, you don’t care. What’s really important is the capability to access your application anywhere, move it freely and easily, and inexpensively add resources for instant scalability.” - Mitchell Crandell, Rightscale, June 2008

Taxonomies of the Cloud Space

Taxonomies are useful to provide insight into a market. It classifies a multitude of players into a smaller bucket.

Andreessen’s Platforms - September 2007

Provided an early taxonomy model for emerging cloud platforms

Platform being a system that can be programmed

• Access API - platform that provides web service endpoints
• Plug-In API - platform invokes your code, that you have deployed remotely
• Runtime Environment - your code runs inside the platform’s process space.

Mehta 11 Layer Stack, April 2008

1. Facilities (space, power, cooling)
2. Network
3. Hardware (e.g. servers Amazon EC2 runs)
4. Hardware virtualization (e.g. Xen for EC2) - optional
5. O/S (e.g. Linux)
6. Systems Management (e.g., tools to manage EC2 instances)
7. Application Middleware (e.g., MySQL on EC2)
8. Application Code
9. Application APIs / Web Services
10. GUI for Application
11. GUI for Application Development / Customization

Croll Cloud Stack, June 2008

7 layer stack within Turnkey app and Generic Platform.

Turnkey app

• SaaS
• Extensible app
• Generic IDE
• Constrained APIs
• App Cluster
• Virtual Data Center
• Virtual Servers

Generic Platform

The bottom of Alistair’s stack includes “root access “style compute clouds.

Robert Anderson, July 2008

3 layer stack

• Software (SaaS)
• Platform (PaaS)
• Infrastructure (IaaS)

This is the model taxonomy for this session.

Related Concepts and Terms

• Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS), Hardware as a Service (HaaS) are synonyms to cloud infrastructure.
• Virtualization
• Hosting
• Autonomic computing
• Distributed computing
• Grid computing

Cloud Applications

• SaaS
• S+S (Software+Services)
• Managed Service Provider (MSP)

Most event processing systems would be incomplete without the ability to process events in the form of messages.   Messages can be delivered in either a connection-oriented protocol or a connectionless protocol.   Most enterprise-class messaging systems have both.   Many messaging systems have features like guarenteed delivery, which are important to many applications.

On the other hand, you do not have to work with a messaging system or enterprise service bus (ESB) to process events, because the transport layer is independent from the event processing layer, theoretically.  Most enterprise-class event processing system architectures will use a combination of both asynchronous and synchronous messaging. 

To understand event processing I recommend you turn to network management and the practical use of Simple Network Management Protocol (SMNP) for a basic undertanding of event processing.   SNMP uses both synchronous event-based messaging, called polling, and asynchronous messaging, called traps.   Network management systems engineers use a combination of both polling and trapping in all enterprise-class operational NMS.  Optimizing polling and trapping is one of the tasks good NMS engineers do well. The same holds true in most distributed event processing architectures.  

For example, look at the CEP/EP reference architecture on this site.  You will notice that the mechanism for event transport is generic, represented as an event bus, but it does not specify the transport protocol.  If you are receiving raw events and comparing correlated results against a signature in a database, you are using both asynchronous and synchronous messaging.    In theory, you could build an event processing system with only connection-oriented protocols, but this would be an exeception, not the rule.

Event processing is generally associated with messaging because we generally represent event-objects as electronic messages.   In theory, we could call these cyber event-objects anything we want; for example, we could call them “packets.” However, packets are generally associated with the underlying Internet Protocol (IP) layer by network engineers.  

Moving up the stack, we think in terms of a complete message-object, which we generally call “a message.”  This message could be an SNMP event-object, an SMTP event-object (an email message), or an HTML request to a web server, to only name a few.    In fact, the basic unit of work at the application level of a distributed network application is what we call “a message.”  

So, in On Messaging and Events Opher asks, “Is event processing just fancy name to message processing ?”

Events are generally represented in some electronic format.  The event-object must be transported electronically in cyberspace, and the way that it is transported is in what network engineers generally call “a message.”   It make no difference what we call it, really; because whatever we call it, it is still binary data representing information we are interested in, hopefully in a format we can efficiently process.    Enterprise-class event processing systems are designed to work with myriad formats, protocols and transports.   One size does not fit all.

A group calling itself “NetDevilz” defaced the homepages for ICANN & IANA.

Ouch.

From Websense:

Websense® Security Labs™ has received reports that the official website of ICANN and IANA Domains have been hijacked by a Turkish group called “NetDevilz”. ICANN and IANA are responsible for the Internet Protocol (IP) address space allocation, protocol identifier assignment, generic (gTLD) and country code Top Level Domain Name System management, and root server system management functions.

For the full advisory please read on.

Article Link

For more on this check out Dancho Danchev’s posting on his site.

So our first topic of interest as part of the Black Hat Bloggers Network promotion was virtualization and security in honor of our own Chris Hoff presenting at Black Hat this year. While several members of the network wrote some really great stuff, I was hoping we would get more of a broader response from the 150+ blogs on the network.  So for topic #2 I wanted to pick something more generic and easier to blog on.  Our topic is why go to Black Hat.  Most of the blogger network members either go to Black Hat or wish they did.  Why?  Lets hear your reasons for going to Black Hat. Is it the briefings?  the parties? seeing old friends? what?  I am hoping to see a lot of blogs on this subject from all of our BHBN member blogs!

I should also point out that Black Hat is doing some great promos leading up to the show.  They have a great webinar coming up today that I totally spaced on because I wanted to give everyone more notice and time to register. In the meantime, don't be like Mike, I mean Shimmy, go register and check out the webcast!  Also be on the look out for some of the other great events they have cooking, as well as registering for the Black Hat Twitter feed.