Rhm2ktmi's List: Cloud - Intercloud

• There are still some things that need to be done," said Melvin Greer, a senior fellow and chief strategist for cloud computing at Lockheed Martin Information Systems, an IBM user. Greer attended IBM's Pulse conference here to discuss the new tools with IBM officials.
• Among the missing: Microsoft's Hyper-V
• IBM also said TPM will extend its service management capabilities to clouds outside the data center. But the only one mentioned was IBM's own cloud, not Google's, Amazon.com's or another public cloud provider, although IBM officials indicated plans to support a list of providers.
• Greer also pointed to some of IBM's recent acquisitions as evidence of the company's push

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• Twenty-one global companies and research institutions have joined the IEEE Intercloud Testbed and launched work to create a diverse, interoperable, and federated cloud ecosystem
• Results from the project will also assist in the development   of the forthcoming IEEE P2302™ Standard for Intercloud Interoperability   and Federation, which is developing standard methodologies for   cloud-to-cloud interworking.

• IBM has invested more than $6 billion in more than a dozen acquisitions since 2007 to accelerate cloud and to provide higher value offerings that give these line of business leaders the expertise rich solutions they need.  And today we are adding a new technology from IBM Research into this portfolio called Intercloud Storage or “cloud of clouds toolkit”.
• Some of the biggest hurdles to cloud adoption are reliability, security and vendor lock-in. If a cloud is hacked, goes out of business or a power failure occurs it could be devastating for a business. On the flip side, if the vendor decides to increase its rates or fails to meet certain obligations the client may want to switch to another vendor.
• An approach to remedy this situation is based on what we call an intercloud or “cloud of clouds”. The main idea behind the intercloud is that its security and reliability exceeds that of the single clouds that make it

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• Hybrid cloud is a topic of great interest to enterprises, and the centerpiece of many vendor marketing campaigns in 2013. It is also ripe for cloud washing

• Before we define hybrid cloud, let's look at what is not a hybrid cloud, and share what some vendors say it is.

   
• It consists of two or more distinct cloud infrastructures that remain unique entities, all coordinated by standardized or proprietary technology, and interoperate to deliver seamless business functions.
• To us, hybrid cloud is simply a delivery model.

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• The ability to move, clone and federate applications between providers is now in the minds of CIOs and CFOs planning their long-term Digital Infrastructure strategies
• An interoperable cloud service is more attractive to the consumer, since it provides the freedom to move applications with no commitment, and therefore a less commercial risk. However, not supporting interoperability affords the provider a degree of lock-in, thereby retaining recurring revenue streams by keeping churn to a minimum.
• Should cloud providers attempt to lock customers into their services or open the floodgates and let them leave?
• Game theory allows us to assess the pros and cons of interoperability, based on how competitors are likely to respond.
• n this report, we examine a scenario of a commoditized market of three cloud providers, each offering the same service – this represents a future state of cloud market, rather than the current.
• We focus purely on the economic advantages and disadvantages of interoperating, ignoring technical, sociological or financial issues. Furthermore, we do not specify the form of interoperability.
• However, many cloud products are highly commoditized. There are opportunities for both commodity and value-adding cloud services in the market.
• Let's consider virtual machines.
• The same applies to storage, IP address and many other basic cloud services. Cloud providers still can differentiate on features, but many cloud resources at the lowest end of the stack are essentially the same between providers.

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• Zimory, the Berlin-based experts on cloud management software, will today be demonstrating how its technology is being used in conjunction with TM Forum’s Information Framework to make a transparent and standardized global cloud computing marketplace a reality
• The Information Framework (SID), within the Frameworx suite of best practices and standards has enabled the Cloud Brokerage Interface to simplify implementation and allow prospective marketplace buyers to start purchasing and using IaaS resources as quickly as possible.
• The Cloud Brokerage Interface enables IT departments to create requests for cloud services, send those requests to a neutral cloud services marketplace, and find a vendor for those services who can fill the request – all with the assurance of knowing that TM Forum’s Frameworx information model is guiding the process
• Zimory, along with TM Forum and Devoteam, will demonstrate how the Cloud Brokerage Interface can be used by IT departments to purchase IaaS resources in “The Hub” at TM Forum’s Management World 2013, held May 13-16 in Nice, France, at the Acropolis Convention Center

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• Cogent is not compliant with one of the basic and long-standing requirements for most settlement-free peering arrangements: that traffic between the providers be roughly in balance. When the traffic loads are not symmetric, the provider with the heavier load typically pays the other for transit (see our ex parte filing[PDF] from the 2010 Comcast/Level 3 spat for more info on peering and transit agreements). This isn’t a story about Netflix, or about Verizon “letting” anybody’s traffic deteriorate. This is a fairly boring story about a bandwidth provider that is unhappy that they are out of balance and will have to make alternative arrangements for capacity enhancements, just like any other interconnecting ISP.

• In the last several months, interest in the concept of cloud brokerage has been growing and was recently punctuated by Accenture’s announced intention  to be the IT industry “cloud broker” as part of a larger $400 million cloud R&D investment
• Bringing Shadow IT into the Light
• Filling the Gaps in Hybrid Cloud Management
• Rationalizing IT Outsourcing

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• We believe the 'best execution venue' concept for hybrid and multi-cloud environments goes to the heart of the hesitation many customers have with the cloud – i.e., which cloud (private and/or which public) is best for a given app, workload or business need? It's certainly relevant for Gravitant. As far as Gravitant is concerned, the problem is getting worse as the number of cloud providers and technologies proliferate. Customers need decision support and a way of managing this new IT supply chain.

• The dust up over OpenStack interoperability could be a bit of a semantics issue but it highlights some growing pains with the open source software.

   

  Yesterday, I wrote about the OpenStack Foundation preparing to work harder on ensuring that clouds that call themselves OpenStack are truly interoperable. I’ve since talked to HP and had another conversation with Josh McKenty, Piston’s CTO and OpenStack board member, and have some more details to share about the future of OpenStack interoperability.

   

• Currently, to call a cloud service OpenStack, the provider has to have Nova and Swift implemented, the compute and storage functionalities of OpenStack, McKenty said. In practice, however, implementing Nova and Swift may not be enough to ensure interoperability, since there currently aren’t directives requiring service providers to implement certain APIs.

   
• But if you raise the bar a bit and try to use certain third party tools built for use with OpenStack, like CloudEnvy for spinning up new instances, they may not work without using libraries that have been developed to account for differences in the services.
• The goal is make the OpenStack clouds interoperable without having to rely on libraries that smooth out their differences.

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• Just how easy is it to move workloads around in the cloud? The Open Data Center Alliance (ODCA) is testing virtual machine interoperability in the enterprise cloud. A new report looks at hypervisor interoperability – just how easy it to move a virtual machine from hypervisor to hypervisor? It identifies gaps that hypervisor and VM solutions providers need to address in order to move VMs between public and private enterprise clouds going forward.   It’s tackling the dangers of “Cloud Lock In” on the hypervisor level, and trying to establish an ODCA VM Interoperability Usage Model

• Originally, the National Institute of Standards and Technology’s Cloud Computing Reference Architecture defined a cloud broker as an entity (person or organization) that provides intermediary-type services between a cloud consumer and multiple cloud providers.
• This is the traditional definition of a broker, akin to a stock broker or commodity broker, where an intermediary assists a customer navigate through a complex environment of many options. A better name for this may be “cloud agent.”
• A second definition of cloud broker pertains to a new type of software that sits on top of cloud providers to abstract, simplify and map various cloud offerings to your environment.
• Cloud broker software assists organizations in creating solutions in the cloud, migrating solutions to the cloud and moving solutions between clouds.
• The key requirements for cloud broker software are as follows
• An editable service catalog to enable discovery of services and solutions migrated to the cloud or available as software-as-a-service (SAAS) applications.
• A provisioning engine that can create server images across one or more cloud providers, perform load analysis and capacity planning, scale to many users and offer rule-based elasticity.
• Identity management services that can manager users and even pass credentials to a particular cloud provider.
• Billing and pricing services so that consumers only pay for what they need and expenditures are accurately tracked across cloud providers.
• Intermediation enhancements to migration, provisioning (cloud and cross-cloud), identity management and reporting.
• The cloud broker software itself should be a cloud application that is distributed, scalable and supports integration.
• InCadence's solution, entitled Axon
• open source project called CompatibleOne

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• Originally, the National Institute of Standards and Technology’s Cloud Computing Reference Architecture defined a cloud broker as an entity (person or organization) that provides intermediary-type services between a cloud consumer and multiple cloud providers. For the Defense Department, the DOD CIO specified that the Defense Information Systems Agency would fulfill the role of Enterprise Cloud Service Broker. This is the traditional definition of a broker, akin to a stock broker or commodity broker, where an intermediary assists a customer navigate through a complex environment of many options. A better name for this may be “cloud agent.”
• A second definition of cloud broker pertains to a new type of software that sits on top of cloud providers to abstract, simplify and map various cloud offerings to your environment. Cloud broker software assists organizations in creating solutions in the cloud, migrating solutions to the cloud and moving solutions between clouds.
• Recently the Health and Human Services Department sent out a request for information entitled, “Cloud Broker Vendor Questionnaire for Cloud Capabilities” that did an excellent job of laying out a set of detailed requirements for cloud broker software.

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• ETSI, OCEAN Project, OGF, OW2 and SNIA invite you to their first joint Cloud Interoperability Week, co-hosted with the EGI and SDC conferences.

   

  http://www.cloudplugfest.org/cloud-interoperability-week

   

  The event will provide an insight into the current stat09-18e of Cloud Standards implementations and use cases. It will evaluate the level of interoperability of different solutions and showcase how Cloud Standards work together.

• The only thing that might be tougher than monitoring all the cloud service and price changes coming out of Amazon Web Services and other providers is keeping track of all the services that track all those cloud services and price changes.

   

  RightScale maintains that its long history of monitoring AWS and other cloud activities for customers gives it an advantage here. It tracks price changes across the major clouds —  Google Compute Engine, Microsoft Azure, and Rackspace and offers a free service to folks wanting to tap into that knowledge.
• And that’s what RightScale will continue to do, pressing into a service technology it acquired last year with its acquisition of ShopforCloud, which it renamed Planforcloud.