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Cloud it or not to Cloud it – Virtualization

January 15, 2009 in Basic Views by pcalcada | No comments

In my “Cloud it or not to Cloud it” set of posts I’m trying to discuss simple concepts or technologies that must be part of any Cloud Computing migration or study. When I say “simple” I’m referring to those technologies that are nowadays well known and had already the opportunity to be transformed in examples that we can trusty follow.

One of those technologies is Virtualization. Thanks to VMware and other persistent companies, and also thanks to the first IBM CP-40, we have in the time being,  a large group of solutions and business models that have been transforming Virtualization in a reality that must be part of every Datacenter or IT department. The recent developments in the hardware field (AMD-V and INTEL-VT) have also contributed to this Virtualization boom.

So, if you haven’t take a look into this Virtualization reality, you haven’t been able to find out how you can increase your hardware infrastructure utilization, how to increase the availability, or even, how you may increase the elasticity and security of your IT infrastructure.

With Virtualization, together with all this infrastructure optimization,  you may also learn how your applications could behave on the Cloud, in the sense that Virtualization is the core of the majority of clouds. Although we have the Azure example and its one-to-one relationship between a VM [virtual machine] and a physical processor core, in the majority of the Clouds you will not have, at least for the time being, this guaranty.

As it’s discussed in the cloud-computing google groups,  Virtualization issue is not only important in order to have all your infrastructure ready to move to the Cloud, just by copying all your virtual machines images to a service provider, but mostly because with it you will be able to acknowledge how you could be forced to redesign or re-engineer your applications, or even the complete IT infrastructure. This redesigning scenario could be the only way to get real benefit from this new Virtualization world, and then, get all the benefits of the Cloud.

If you still haven’t  started, try this examples:

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Cloud player acquired by SUN

January 10, 2009 in CloudViews by hugo.mag | 2 comments

In my my first post I asked the question “What new applications will it bring?” but as many as you know, at this time we are already seeing new applications to pop up.

One of them is QLayer that sells Virtual Private DataCenter (VPDC). SUN has acquired it recently so the interest in the cloud keeps growing.

Geeks and entrepreneurs, its time to build your cloud company and offer yourselfs to big players!!

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Cloud it or not to Cloud it – Identity Management

January 8, 2009 in IT Departments, Identity Management, Interoperability by pcalcada | 3 comments

Everything in our society, from business to the Internet, is about trust and reputation. A solid Identity Management Infrastructure is fundamental to “transmit” reputation, and then, to be able to create the trust links.
Preparing a migration to the cloud must always be preceded by the creation of an Identity Management platform. With it, you will be able to interact with the cloud service providers, and also integrate your local infrastructure with the cloud: users will be able to access your LAN using a 802.1x access control system; login in a desktop with Microsoft Windows Cardspace; read their email on the Google APPs; do a deal with a Salesforce CRM application; write a document on ThinkFree.com Write (or better, on the Zoho Writer), etc.

Ok, this is not as easy at it looks (at least for the time being). Identity Management is a very complex subject and a target of many and very enthusiastic discussions. As an example we have the recent “fight” about the OASIS XRI 2.0 specification. Even the “father” (Tim Berners-Lee) of the Web was part of this discussion:
“We are not satisfied that XRIs provide functionality not
readily available from http: URIs. Accordingly the TAG recommends
against taking the XRI specifications forward, or supporting the use of
XRIs as identifiers in other specifications”

You can follow this on the openid.net post: http://openid.net/pipermail/general/2008-May/004817.html.

Despite all of this, we already have a group of technological solutions that provides the necessary basis for a solid Identity Management infrastructure. The last one to joint this group was the Geneva from Microsoft, but already have solutions from the major IT companies:

The majority of this solutions are following the path of normalization, they are implementing OASIS specifications like WS-* (WS-Trust, WS-Secutity, etc),  SAML1/2, or even OpenID.  This is a very important decision, without this normalizations efforts we won’t be able to achieve one of the major objectives (characteristic) of a real Cloud – Interoperability. A great example in this direction are the recent Microsoft decisions about Geneva: http://www.identityblog.com/?p=1018.

Another example, this time in the OpenID field, is the work done by the OpenID Japan. Take a look on the incredible list of member companies that they have, including technological companies, banks and insurance companies.

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