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)

The Sopranokovs 

The Russian mob comes to town with a new scam—medical identity theft. 

When FBI special agent Ted Price peered through the window of a dingy brick storefront on Southwest Morrison Street in March, it was what he didn’t see that caught his attention. 

The business, called UnimedCorner, claimed to provide ailing seniors with orthotics—braces and other devices to correct foot, joint and back problems. 

Price and other federal investigators were skeptical. 

On Unimed’s showroom floor, Price saw wheelchairs, motorized scooters, a variety of canes and, on the walls, a selection of amateurish paintings and framed photographs. There was no evidence, however, of the kinds of equipment for which Unimed had billed Medicare nearly $2 million in the previous couple of months. 

“I observed wheelchairs and canes through the window but did not see any orthotics in the store,” Price later wrote in a search-warrant affidavit. “It is a sign of fraud that the store is not stocking the items [for which] it is billing.” 

By the time Price arrived on the scene, the company’s owner, a shadowy Russian immigrant named Alexandr Shcherbakov, was long gone. 

Today, Shcherbakov’s store sits undisturbed. The message light on the phone blinks, dead potted plants droop and a stuffed toy monkey slumps in a glass display case. 

And behind the cash register hangs a framed poster of television’s best-known mobsters, the Sopranos. 

From interviews and information presented in federal affidavits, it is clear Shcherbakov moved to Oregon to commit a crime elegant and lucrative enough to make Tony Soprano envious: medical identity theft. 

... 

“Medical identity theft is the new frontier for organized crime,” says Alex Johnson, a former FBI agent who investigates fraud for Regence BlueShield. “Pretty much anybody can set up a mom-and-pop operation and start cranking out claims.” Someday, most Americans will need a cane, wheelchair, home hospital bed or another of the items healthcare professionals call “durable medical equipment,” or DME. 

For those over 64 and without private insurance, there’s a good chance federally funded Medicare will pick up the tab for that equipment. Last year, according to federal statistics, Medicare spent $8.6 billion on DME. 

Here’s the way the system is supposed to work: A doctor prescribes a device such as a wheelchair for a patient, who presents his prescription to a DME supplier. The supplier provides the equipment and bills Medicare, which typically pays 80 percent of the cost. Unlike pharmacists, who fill prescriptions under strict scrutiny of state and federal watchdogs, DME suppliers are lightly regulated. “DME is very vulnerable to fraud,” says Consuelo Woodhead, the chief healthcare fraud prosecutor for the U.S. Attorney’s Office in Los Angeles. “It doesn’t require any background in medicine, any kind of professional licensure or appreciable capital. 

There are barriers of entry in other medical fields, but not in DME.” To operate, DME suppliers simply need a place of business, a business license and liability insurance. Unlike pharmacists, DME suppliers operate under an honor system: The feds count on them to supply the equipment they claim to provide to the beneficiaries who need it. 

That honor system is not working. 

The epicenter of DME fraud, according to the federal Department of Health and Human Services, is South Florida, where Medicare billing for DME quadrupled from 2002 to 2006 to $1.7 billion. Investigators found much of that increase was due to fraud. In 2006, federal inspectors revoked the licenses of 634 DME suppliers in South Florida, nearly half the DME dealers in the region. 

Later the same year, raids in Southern California yielded similar results: The feds shut down 95 DME suppliers. Many of the DME suppliers shut down around Los Angeles were run by immigrants from the former Soviet Union. It’s probably no coincidence that when the feds raided Los Angeles DME suppliers, some Angelenos fled to cities where there was less scrutiny—such as Portland.

• presse@ccc.de (preferred)
• 0700-CHAOSFON (0700 - 24267366)
  

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

Weldon, who is currently being investigated by the FBI over alleged corruption during his time in office, visited Libya in March to discuss a possible military deal, according to a letter describing the trip from Weldon to Defense Solutions CEO Timothy Ringgold. In May, Weldon, together with Ringgold and another company representative, traveled to Moscow to discuss working with Russia's weapons-export agency on arms sales to the Middle East.

Both trips were part of the company's effort to tap into the growing -- and often legally murky -- market for selling weapons from former Eastern Bloc countries to the Middle East and Afghanistan.

Ex-Rep. Curt Weldon, R-Penn., is helping broker deals between Russian weapons suppliers and the Iraqi and Libyan governments through his company, Defense Solutions.
Photo: H. Rumph Jr/AP

The Russians want to sell weapons to Iraq directly, but "must go slow on Iraq because of political reasons" and want to work with an "intermediary" like Defense Solutions, CEO Ringgold subsequently wrote to colleagues. "They have not spoken with any American company that can offer the quid pro quo that we can or that has the connections in Russia that we have," he boasted.

A few years ago, an American company proposing to sell weapons to Libya might have triggered a congressional hearing. So, too, would have a proposal to conduct arms deals with Russia, which the United States has accused of selling high-tech weapons to Syria and Iran.

However, U.S. government efforts to rapidly equip countries like Afghanistan and Iraq -- which have largely Soviet-origin weapons -- have created legal ambiguities and loopholes in export controls that didn't exist in years past and given rise to a new class of arms trade middlemen. So, even though both Libya and the Russian arms export agency are on official U.S. blacklists, government officials and analysts involved in weapons sales say the rules have become unclear as the push to equip allies in the global war on terror has blazed new but uncertain legal ground.

Eagerly stepping into that virgin territory is Defense Solutions, a Pennsylvania-based company that is carving out a small but lucrative niche in a new international arms bazaar. The firm boasts as its advisors a number of influential Washington insiders, such as retired General Barry McCaffrey, the former White House drug czar.

Helping the firm make key connections is Curt Weldon, a former Republican congressman from Pennsylvania at the center of an FBI investigation into alleged conflicts of interest during his time in office. Weldon, now a key executive at Defense Solutions, is working with the company to set up these weapons deals.

Defense Solutions has also proposed refurbishing Libya's BTR-60 armored personnel carriers, according to a sales proposal seen by Wired.com. Defense Solutions denies drafting a sales proposal to Libya.

It's an unusual, if not an entirely unexpected chapter for Weldon, whose time in office included frequent trips to Russia. As an influential member of the House Armed Services Committee, Weldon pushed for multibillion-dollar defense programs, like ballistic missile defense, and earned a reputation as a foreign policy gadfly, boasting of his contacts with officials in nations labeled by the administration as "rogue states" such as Libya and North Korea. Weldon's wild claims about a 9/11 cover-up and his sensationalist book warning of an Iranian terror plot, sometimes earned him official scorn and public ridicule, but it was accusations that he steered contracts to Eastern European businesses linked to his daughter's lobbying firm that drew the government's attention.

Weldon was voted out of office in 2006 just weeks after the FBI raided his daughter's home, and that of one of her associates.

Weldon did not respond to e-mails and phone requests to be interviewed or comment for this article. But in a 2006 interview, before the FBI probe was public, Weldon spoke enthusiastically about setting up a "front company" to work with the Russian arms agency, Rosoboronexport. Weldon hoped this company could sell weapons to the Middle East, and other regions, particularly to countries where the U.S. has strained relations. He claimed the director of Rosoboronexport approached him to work with "an American company that would act as a front for weapons these nations want to buy."

Weldon called the proposal an "unbelievable offer."

The administration, he acknowledged at the time, did not welcome the idea of an American company selling Russian weapons to potentially unfriendly countries. But two years later, Weldon, now a private citizen and chief strategic officer for Defense Solutions, appears to be working on precisely that sort of deal. And whether illegal or not, Defense Solutions' business represents a new phenomenon in the international arms trade business.

In years past arms brokers -- firms or individuals who serve as middlemen to facilitate weapons sales between countries -- were largely the stuff of spy thrillers. Unlike traditional American defense companies, like Lockheed Martin or Boeing, which typically sell weapons directly to NATO countries or other governments regarded as friendly to the United States, brokers are often small outfits run by people with sometimes questionable experience and reputations they will sell to anyone. One of the most infamous arms brokers, a Russian named Viktor Bout, is charged by the United States, United Nations, Interpol and others of funneling arms to terrorists and rebels around the world. He was recently arrested in Thailand. The United States is requesting his extradition on charges of supplying arms to a terrorist organization.

Two Marines lower the trim vane on the front of an Iraqi BMP-1 mechanized infantry combat vehicle that was captured during Operation Desert Storm. The American defense consulting firm Defense Solutions has proposed refurbishing Libya's aging fleet of BMP-1s. Defense Solutions denies drafting a sales proposal to Libya.

But ironically, Iraq has fueled a new market for these professional middlemen; the United States is funneling billions of dollars into modernizing Iraq's army so that the country's government can fend for itself after coalition troops withdraw. And Iraq's largely Soviet-equipped military is a natural market for Eastern European countries brimming with old or out-of-date equipment they would like to unload. The middlemen, in these cases, serve a key role by allowing the U.S. government to do business with an American company, which in turn buys equipment from Eastern Bloc countries in deals worth hundreds of millions of dollars, much of it financed with U.S. taxpayer dollars.

One of Defense Solutions' sales -- a deal to sell Hungarian-owed T-72 tanks to Iraq in 2005 -- was typical of these new foreign military sales. But on the more questionable side is the company's plans to work with Rosoboronexport, which is barred from doing business with the U.S. government, and Libya, which is still on the State Department's arms embargo list.

The Eastern European-Middle East arms-brokering business, while in some cases sanctioned by the U.S. government, has run into problems, including outright corruption and quality. Defense contractor Dale Stoffel, the president of Wye Oak Technology, and another American were gunned down in Iraq in December 2004 after Stoffel alleged that the Iraqi Ministry of Defense was involved in a kickback scheme. Like Defense Solutions, the company Stoffel worked for was refurbishing the Iraq's army Eastern Bloc equipment.

Another problem is quality. Weapons from the former Soviet Bloc, which the U.S. military euphemistically calls "nonstandard equipment," have been flagged as substandard, acknowledges Brigadier General Charles Luckey, who is in charge of security assistance at Multi-National Security Transition Command-Iraq. In an interview from Iraq, Brigadier General Luckey said: "One of the frustrating things about buying nonstandard [weapons], is that I'm the guy who has to deal with the fact that some broker I've never heard of allowed weapons to get to Iraq before they were inspected."

Defense Solutions is carving a new niche in the arms trade, selling Soviet-made weapons to Middle Eastern countries like Afghanistan and Iraq. Defense Solutions sold Hungarian-owed T-72 tanks to Iraq in 2005.

In one high-profile case, Iraqi officials alleged that a corrupt firm sold them $400 million in shoddy helicopters from Poland. More recently, a company led by a 21-year-old and a former masseur was offered a U.S. government contract worth nearly $300 million to sell ammunition to Afghanistan. The ammunition turned out to be outdated and of dubious origin and several people connected with the company have been indicted. A congressional investigation concluded that the company, which was on a State Department watch list, was able to take advantage of regulatory loopholes by using middlemen.

For those concerned about illicit arms trade, this new wave of weapons deals is rife with the potential for corruption and abuse, but for companies eager to pursue markets once regarded as dubious, it represents a lucrative business opportunity. The problem in these cases, according to those familiar with arms sales, is that it's no longer clear what's legal and what's not.

Rachel Stohl, an expert on international arms trade and a senior analyst at Center for Defense Information, says that in many ways, the rush to equip Iraq has led the United States to throw caution to the wind. She points to a report by the Government Accountability Office last year that found that some 190,000 weapons sold to Iraq have gone missing. "I think the reality is we won't know, until way after the fact, about all of these irregularities with the Iraq weapons provision program," she said. "We were providing them all these assault rifles that have gone missing. Why? They were not following the standard procedures that were in place."

But Iraq and Afghanistan aren't the only markets available to arms brokers like Defense Solutions. The gradual normalization of relations with Libya opens another door into a quasi-legal area of sales.

Like Iraq, Libya has a substantial arsenal of Soviet-origin military weapons, offering a potential market for brokers working with Russia and other former Soviet states. But even when there's not an outright ban, sales to the Middle East are often fraught with controversy, particularly to countries like Libya, which was under international sanction for more than a decade. Even as sanctions against it have been lifted, European companies proposing to sell arms to Libya have faced steep criticism, particularly since the country is still ruled by dictator Muammar Gaddafi, who took power in a military coup in 1969.

While the United States lifted Libya's "state sponsor of terrorism" designation in 2006, other restrictions, such as on the sale of arms, remain in place. A State Department spokesperson confirmed that exports of "lethal munitions" to Libya, such as tanks or related equipment, are still banned, although sales of nonlethal equipment are now allowed on a case-by-case basis.

In late March, Weldon traveled to Libya for a weeklong trip at the invitation of the Gaddafi Foundation, a group run by the son of Libya's leader, and the chairman of Libya's foreign affairs committee, according to the report he sent to Defense Solutions (.pdf), a copy of which was obtained by Wired.com. The trip reports states: "Agreement reached for Weldon to quickly return to Libya for meetings with son [of Libyan leader Gaddafi] Morti regarding defense and security cooperation."

A document dated April 16, just two weeks after Weldon's trip, outlines Defense Solutions' proposal to Libya to refurbish the country's fleet of armored vehicles, including its T-72 tanks, BMP-1 infantry fighting vehicles, and BTR-60 armored personnel carriers. A copy of the sales proposal, also provided to Wired.com, is on Defense Solutions' letterhead, appears to bear the signature of company CEO Timothy Ringgold, and is addressed to Libya's defense procurement council. "Defense Solutions is committed to delivering a full end-to-end solution to its clients," the proposal states. "Besides refurbishing these vehicles, we are capable of providing a full logistics support package, including a two year supply of spare parts, maintenance and repair services, and operator, maintenance, and repair training."

In an interview with Wired.com, Ringgold admitted that he's interested in doing business in Libya and confirms receiving Weldon's trip report from Libya, but denies drafting or signing an arms-sale proposal. "I've never made such a document to Libya," Ringgold insisted, after being read the proposal, and told that his signature is on it.

In addition to the Libyan arms-deal document, Wired.com has also reviewed copies of e-mails from Ringgold discussing the Libyan deal.

While Ringgold denies proposing an arms sale to Libya, he is open about speaking with Rosoboronexport, which has been on a U.S. government sanctions list since 2006, after the Russian state agency allegedly violated the Iran and Syria Nonproliferation Act. An April e-mail provided to Wired.com describes Ringgold, Weldon and Stephan Minikes, a senior advisor to Defense Solutions and a former ambassador, meeting with Rosoboronexport. The conversations included a number of potential deals, including supplying Mi-17 helicopters to Afghanistan and spare parts for Iraq's infantry fighting vehicles. Ringgold wrote to colleagues following the visit, describing the meetings as a "spectacular success," saying the Russian agency "has the ability to undercut all cost proposals from brokers."

Ringgold confirmed those discussions and said that his company has sought to do business with Rosoboronexport. Asked whether Ringgold considers his dealings with Russia to be legal, he argued that U.S. companies could work with Rosoboronexport on a "case-by-case" basis. "The particular purpose of the meeting we had -- and I want to be crystal clear -- was in response to a U.S. government requirement," he said.

A number of officials at the State Department and in the Pentagon, when contacted for this article, could not say whether working with Rosoboronexport is legal or not. A Pentagon spokeswoman said she was familiar with the issue, but deferred the question to the State Department. When asked about Rosoboronexport's status on the blacklist, John Herzberg, a State Department spokesman replied: "What's on there is on there."

Asked whether, given the ban, there was any way a company could legally work with Rosoboronexport, as Ringgold suggested, Herzberg provided an equivocal answer. "At the stage of the process we're at, I'm unable to give you an answer," he said. "You can try elsewhere in government, and maybe they'll be braver than me."

In an interview from Iraq, General Luckey conceded it was a murky area, but said, "My understanding is they are currently on our no-go list."

The confusion over debarred parties has even led the U.S. government into its own legal tangles, according to Jim McAleese, a Washington attorney who specializes in government contracting and foreign military sales. Because the Russian government violated U.S. nonproliferation laws, even NASA had to go to Congress to ensure it could work with Russia on Soyuz flights to the international space station. "What I'm warning you about is, don't be surprised by the confusion," McAleese said. "There are a whole bunch of different statutes that were adopted piecemeal and were never intended to be reconciled."

But it's the very ambiguity of the law that troubles those who monitor export control. "It's highly unusual to do anything with the Russians, particularly Rosoboronexport," said Scott Jones, director of Export Control Programs at the Center for International Trade and Security at the University of Georgia.

Legal or not, reputable American companies simply don't want to work with banned entities, Jones said, for fear of risking their reputations and business. "Even if it's not an outright prohibition, most companies don't want to put themselves in a liability situation that has really bad PR … and they stay away from it," Jones said. "But if that's your business, pimping out arms from the U.S. or Russia, that's the way it works, and you push as much as possible."

Finding any U.S. defense company working with the Russian government at this point would be "remarkable," Jones added.

In the meantime, the future for Weldon is unclear. The FBI investigation continues and Weldon's former chief of staff recently pleaded guilty to a conspiracy charge and is cooperating with the government, notes Melanie Sloan, the executive director of Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, which filed a complaint against Weldon in 2004. Sloan speculated that Weldon may be charged with "honest service fraud" for misusing his office for personal gain. "It's an easier standard than bribery," she said. "I wouldn't be surprised [if he's charged] with bribery, but I think it will be honest services fraud."

Ringgold insists that he and Weldon are on the right side of the law. "Everything we do is in strict compliance with international and U.S. law and we operate only in the best interests of the U.S. government," he said. "I didn't serve 30 years in the United States Army to throw that away on a whim."

Asked if Weldon is still working for the company, Ringgold replied: "Absolutely, proudly so."

The net could see its biggest transformation in decades if plans to open up the address system are passed.

The net’s regulators will vote on Thursday to decide if the strict rules on so-called top level domain names, such as .com or .uk, can be relaxed.

If approved, it could allow companies to turn their brands into domain names while individuals could also carve out their own corner of the net.

The move could also see the launch of .xxx, after years of wrangling.

The part I find funny is the number of politicians that think having a .xxx domain will cordon off sexually oriented websites from the rest of the web.

The move could yet be blocked as the independent arbitration panel can reject domains based on “morality or public order” grounds.

Morality on the Internet. Hmmm, ok.

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