Session: Different strokes for different folks: a taxonomy of cloud offerings
Peter just left Oracle, was there via BEA, for Tendril Networks (startup). Peter has done a lot of research, thinking, on cloud computing and related players. We were handed a copy of his Cloud Vendor Taxonomy (May 2009 update).
Peter tells folks that as enterprise cloud computing advocates, need to have a definition (elevator speech). Peter is going through a bunch of definitions he pulled from blogs, articles, quotes of fellow speakers.
Calling out key controversial words found in many definitions:
- Infinite – endless supply is illusion
- Internet – doesn’t include private clouds
- Pay as you go – important concept
- Powered by software – important concept
- Joe Weinman “Common, Location independent, Online utility that is available on-Demand” – not always location independent
- Peter likes Geva Perry’s list of cloud computing platform characteristics from 2008:
“ * Self-healing: In case of failure, there will be a hot backup instance of the application ready to take over without disruption (known as failover). It also means that when I set a policy that says everything should always have a backup, when such a fail occurs and my backup becomes the primary, the system launches a new backup, maintaining my reliability policies.
* SLA-driven: The system is dynamically managed by service-level agreements that define policies such as how quickly responses to requests need to be delivered. If the system is experiencing peaks in load, it will create additional instances of the application on more servers in order to comply with the committed service levels — even at the expense of a low-priority application.
* Multi-tenancy: The system is built in a way that allows several customers to share infrastructure, without the customers being aware of it and without compromising the privacy and security of each customer’s data.
* Service-oriented: The system allows composing applications out of discrete services that are loosely coupled (independent of each other). Changes to or failure of one service will not disrupt other services. It also means I can re-use services.* Virtualized: Applications are decoupled from the underlying hardware. Multiple applications can run on one computer (virtualization a la VMWare) or multiple computers can be used to run one application (grid computing).
* Linearly Scalable: Perhaps the biggest challenge. The system will be predictable and efficient in growing the application. If one server can process 1,000 transactions per second, two servers should be able to process 2,000 transactions per second, and so forth.
* Data, Data, Data: The key to many of these aspects is management of the data: its distribution, partitioning, security and synchronization. New technologies, such as Amazon’s SimpleDB, are part of the answer, not large-scale relational databases. And don’t let the name fool you. As my colleague Nati Shalom rightfully proclaims, SimpleDB is not really a database. Another approach that is gaining momentum is in-memory data grids.”
3 Taxonomy Approaches: simple and organic, academic, vendor
Simple and Organic: SaaS, PaaS, IaaS
Academic: See Toward a Unified Ontology of Cloud Computing (pdf). Diagram Peter showed is from this John M. Willis blog post.
Peter’s Vendor Taxonomy: The diagram linked below is dated September 2008, the paper version handed out is May 2009. But, you’ll get the idea of what Peter is talking about. He’s walking through the major nodes right now. Makes point that Cloud does not equal Grid. Cloud uses grids.
[Click on Diagram to enlarge]
Peter says Fabric Management is a space to watch. Is it feature of platform, of an offering itself. [Me, I say it’s both. Definitely need as offering for enterprises, governments building private clouds].
Peter says this talk was meant to be survey of field. Do take a look at the taxonomies above to get a feel for space.
PDF 
