Dave Gimpl: Computing as a Service
Infrastructure for vaporware. They are working on the infrastructure that enables cloud-computing.
Challenges in the data center: rising costs of the operations, the explosion of data, the difficulty of deploying new application and services, the difficulty in managing complex virtual machine systems. When you map the business processes, they map to a variety of systems on the data center floor.
Blue Cloud is IBM’s entry in Cloud Computing. Cloud Computing is holistic systems management. Similar to Grid or Cluster computing. A combination of “pervasive virtualization” for both server and storage. Allows for virtualization across varied hardware (I think). On demand and autonomic management and Utility Computing (Amazon’s service offering).
They gather up like systems (not necessarily identical) and manage them as a pool. The focus changes from managing the SAN or server. You let the “ensemble” manage itself and you manage the Virtual Image.
When the image moves to another system, does it move with state?
North Carolina State’s implementation is open source. All of the standards are open source. The ensembles are wrapped with SOAP/SOA interfaces. At North Carolina State Virtual Compute Lab – a student can request a XP machine to do their project. They get the machine in increments of 30 minutes. They are providing service for other institutions in their area.
Ken Klingenstein mentions a paper “The Computational Data Center: The Science Cloud”
Mark Morgan: Genesis II – Accessible, Standards Based Grid Computing
http://www.cs.virginia.edu/~vcgr
The problems: we have target grid user that are unable or unwilling to learn new programming tools & paradigms. Users want the benefit of the grid without having to know about the grid.
Anything you can put a service in front of and put on the internet, is part of the grid. Telescopes, microscopes, computing power, storage, data, sensors.
Want to share this but sharing in a mutually distrustful domain.
Genesis II implements the standards that come out of the OGF (Open Grid Foundation) to test them and vet them. Open Grid Service Architecture is part of the OGF.
Grids have been around for a long time but they are being used. People who design grids want cool features. User don’t care. Genesis II is focused on the user and making grids usable.
The Specs:
- Resource Naming Service (RNS) – maps human-readable name to web service endpoints. Supports Add, Remove, List.
- ByteIO – allows you to treat grid resources like a POSIX-like file resource.
- Basic Execution Service (BES) – interface for starting, managing and stopping computing jobs.
- WS-Naming – Endpoint Identifiers, Enpoint Resolution
You interact with the grid system in “file-like” ways. Double click on a database query, drag a job onto a server resource, etc.
They use an FTP interface to manage resources on the grid. On linux side, OGRSH acts as an intermediary between bash and the grid. Users can do “ls”, “cat”, “cp” and OGRSH will redirect requests into the grid as appropriate.
Nigel Watling: Cloud Computing and the Internet Service Bus
Building out a new data center in Chicago. Microsoft is deploying 10,000 servers a month to support cloud computing. Amazon expects their services operation to bypass the retail business soon.
Issues that come up:
- How do I expose a service broadly?
- How do I handle identity and access control
- How do I interoperate? Between vendors? Between standards?
Connect their composite application through an ESB to the internal applications and then out to the cloud for distributed resources.
Roland Hedberg: OM2
OM2 is about representing events and moving information about events from one place to another. A publish-subscribe messaging system originally designed around IdM. Implementations in Python, Java and PERL.
Three ontologies: message, operation and object ontologies. Message is the header like for mail. Operation describes the actions (Miro ontology) which includes if-then-else as well as the usual add, modify, etc. Objects describe the objects.
Messages are based on RDF/XML. Includes support for Dynamic delegation Discovery System (DDDS, RFC 3401-3).
“Ontology Driven Application Development.”
Example applications:
Eduroam (http://www.eduroam.org) : allows you to travel between universities throughout Europe and use your local credentials to authenticate to the wireless network.
Bologna Process: supporting the movement of students between universities. Any student should be able to go another university and take a class then come back. Has admissions control and grade reporting.
What OM2 does: Transport the information to the correct address at all time by the use of DDDS, by the transport protocol of the receivers choice.
Brian Busby: ESB at UW-Madison
Talk about our use of the ESB and experience with SOA.
UW-System has been looking at SOA for years (4 or 5 years). We got to where we were going to buy a commercial SOA suite but we passed on the purchase. SOA went into hibernation. Then two projects came along:
- Course Roster Information Service
- Course Guide
We made a decision to take advantage of a license for the Cape Clear ESB. We can take advantage of this.
Interesting impact: people suddenly had to change their discussion to be around services that they need not big data loads or APIs and they made the change.
Issues:
- Right-sizing the environment – we don’t know how many people are going to be using the ESB or the load on the services.
- ESB as a service hosting facility
- Collaborate development teams (Integration Competency Centers)
- What aspects of integration should the ESB handle – do you put all the business logic in the ESB, etc
- Support of the loosely coupled environment
Organization Issues:
- Governance
- Ownership of the services, orchestration, operational data stores
- Security policies
- Web services granularity
- Data representation – what XML should we use to represent data
- Service Level Agreements
- Service definition & re-use
The fact that we got the ESB in place is driving the conversations that we were having years ago forward finally.
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Jim Phelps 