Blog of Random Thoughts and Pictures

I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud

May 24th, 2009

I have found two recent manifestos for clouds
a) “WE BELIEVE that clouds are unjustly maligned and that life would be immeasurably poorer without them”.
b) “it does not have to maintain multiple sets of artificially high levels of resources to handle peak demands”.
One statement is from the appreciation society of clouds and the other is an open manifesto statement for cloud computing?

pollcode.com free polls
Which statement is for an open manifesto statement for cloud computing?
We believe that clouds are unjustly maligned and that life would be immeasurably poorer without them It does not have to maintain multiple sets of artificially high levels of resources to handle peak d   

Photo Credit: Me for once, miguelpdl on Flickr http://www.flickr.com/photos/miguelpdl/open cloud manifesto security, data interoperability, data portability, and management are the main issues, although it looks like Microsoft are calling it for undue bias towards its authors.
From a security perspective Scott Bradner has an interesting twist on the “security nightmare” that comes with cloud computing.
As for rolling your own cloud …. have a look at Hadoop.

A draft FI architecture framework

April 17th, 2009

The 4WARD deliverable D2.2 Draft Architectural Framework [pdf] is available for public review and comment.
A short summary of the content of this document and the 4WARD macroscopic architectural view (Stratum) and microscopic architectural view of network infrastructure and its resources can be seen off this link to the TSSG 4WARD blog.
With the Future Internet being envisioned as different network architectures coexisting and sharing a common infrastructure, we have been wondering here at the TSSG, well Patsy and Zohra specifically have been asking the questions of how these network architectures could/would/can be specifically tailored to a particular user or application requirement and can take into account the characteristics of the available networking resources and infrastructure.
Photo Credit: fratella on Flickr http://www.flickr.com/photos/fratella/
We’ve looked and thought about a possible FI design processes, representing the workflow ranging from a business idea as a starting point to the design of network architecture models (NAM) and software architecture models (SAM). We’ve followed this with looking at the instantiation and operation of a network architecture fulfilling the detailed technical requirements derived from the business idea.
Given that we believe complex software design will have a big part to play in the realisation of this FI vision, Component Based Architecture (CBA) is an approach we have used to
To provide support for the development of systems as assemblies of components.
To support the development of components as reusable entities.
To facilitate the maintenance and upgrading of systems by customising or replacing
their components.
We have attempted to marry a design process with CBA in mind to define FI architectural components, their relationships and their functionalities, and to place these artifacts within a FI Design Repository.
In this way the component specifications (listing of contracts) of available components are stored within the design repository.
Why is this important? Patsy believes that the component contract forms the basis for interoperability and composition. The contract provides the formal mechanism by which interoperability between components can be measured. This interoperability then becomes the basis for composition as you can only compose components that are interoperable. The contract meta-data may also be used to construct anthologies of contracts and associated components, these anthologies when linked to functionalities such as QoS, mobility can be used to guide a designer from a functional requirement to possible contracts that fulfil the requirement and ultimately associated components.
At the higher abstraction level of Strata, CBA is providing the functional blocks (components) and units of interoperability (contracts) that can be used during the composition process. While at the CBA level is providing a link to development and deployment.
Okay this is the overview, some finer detail can be found in the deliverable D2.2

Future Internet Meme

March 8th, 2009

So the internet crowd was asked Do We Need a New Internet? and John Markoff’s article in the New York Times has induced an interesting response from the Slashdot and Digg crowd.
7 maart - NU FUTURE: Het Grote Recessiefeest by De Balie
Its mostly negative such as this punchline from Milton Mueller at CiricleID

people who say that we can fix the problems of the Internet by developing a “new” Internet are saying, in effect, that we can undo history and start over again.

.
Ed Felten plainly says No Thanks and argues that

The Net, like any large human-built institution, is far from perfect — but that doesn’t mean that we would be better off tearing it down and starting over.

David Akin reckons the Internet may just Need new Users. The short answers in all these items seems to be an Almost Certainly, No and for the long answer … well I’ll leave that to one Gene Spafford, one of the quoted interviewees for the NY Times piece, Gene thinks the

Internet itself is not the biggest problem. Rather, it is the endpoints, the policies, the economics, and the legal environment that make things so difficult.

.

FIA Madrid 2008

January 21st, 2009

No its not a round of the F1 calendar, but an assembly gathering of European researchers contributing to the vision of the Future Internet.
FIA
Full details on the agenda for the 2 day meeting along with all the presentations and position papers can be found on this link
From the plenary session I found the German G-Lab project as described by Volkmar Dietz, BMBF quite interesting.
The majority of my time was spent in the Management and Service Aware Networking Architecture (MANA) session.
There were invited talks from the US on “Future Internet of Networks and Services” where Jeff Chase (Duke University) and Suzanne Iacono (NSF) offered their view points.
For the panel session on Service-aware Networking Architectures, I found the item presented by George Pavlou (UCL, U.K.) – for evolutionary service-aware architectures the most enlightening. However in aspect I didn’t enjoy from this session was the fact that the agenda mentioned that the panelists should have a 10 min short presentation and then a Q+A ….. every speaker seemed to overrun their time which left the whole session seriously overran with impatience!
The third panel on the “Self-management of Future Internet” had a presentation by Marcus Bunner (NEC Research, Germany) – for In-network management, which very much follows up on our collaboration in the WP4 of the ICT 4WARD project.
Also there was Joe Butler (Intel, Ireland) – highlighting the SLA for service management research coming out of the ICT SLA@SOI project.
In the summary proceedings for this MANA session 11 questions as asked during the session were highlighted. Most interesting for me were the discussion on:
• What the changes are there in Management responsibilities for Future Internet.
• What the changes are there in relationships between Management and Governance.
• What the changes are there in accountability and responsibility in Future Internet.
• What the changes are there in relation to Management and Costs in Future Internet.
• What the changes are there in management technologies.
All will be fully answered and solved by the next event which is planned for Prague, May 11th-13th 2009.

Future Internet event in Dublin

December 14th, 2008

I had the pleasure to attend the TSSG hosted Irish Future Internet Forum in the Dublin Digital Exchange (part of the Digital Hub) on the 29th Oct 2008.
I say pleasure as I know behind the scenes there was a real tight deadline to the pull this one together and Kevin D. and his team did an excellent job to do so.
There were presentations giving an overview of EU & Asian activities in the Future Internet, with the Akari Architecture Conceptual Design for New Generation Network [pdf] is a quite interesting take on the societal considerations, future basic technologies, and design principles that should be used when designing a new network architecture. It appears that serious consideration has been given to both the top-down demands of solving societal problems and the bottom-up conditions of future available component technologies in the Japanese Akari, and its a programme I must take more indepth look at.
The EU approach is summed up with the video attached below

With the accompanying EU website on ICT reaserch around the Future Internet worth a visit.

Ready, Aim FIREWeek

November 2nd, 2008

It has been 72 days since my last post …. 72 days since that lovely summer break, its unbelievable how quick time goes by. If you don’t mind I’m going to cover some things that have happened in the recent past.
So there was FIREWeek in September in Paris
FIREWeek Poster
The event started on the 10th of September with the FIRE Launch Event in L’Hotel de Ville Paris. All the slides can be seen off the launch event site
, however for me it was quite interesting to see the perspectives of the American Testbed Initiative and Japanese Testbed Initiative.
On the 11th of September 2008 I participated in the FIREworks Strategy Workshop, which I must say was excellently run.
I was asked to give a few words around the topic of “Resource description: The cornerstone of federation” and my presentation can be seen on SlideShare (and below if embedded correctly).

Haven given the presentation and receiving some feedback it is clear this there are two schools of thought in regards to the Resource description, one on the side of Service Orientated Architectures (SoA) and another towards Ontologies (and the Semantic Web).
All the slides and presentations can be seen off this programme link.
On the 12th of September 2008, I was due to take a day off and visit …… well Paris, however with the very interesting Workshop on Converged Networks happening that day I took in the morning session and made a quick presentation on the TSSG research activities around the “Management Of Future Communication Networks And Services“.

Internet adoption rates have they exceeded that of earlier mass communication techno­logies

July 23rd, 2008

I must admit I had always had this nugget in my mind that Internet adoption rates exceeded those of earlier mass communication techno­logies (radio, tv), but I may just be clinging to one of those cybertruths.
According to Gisle Hannemyr and his report ‘A Critical Examination of Adoption Rates‘ there appear to be no major differences between the adoption rate of the Internet and the patterns of adoption for radio and tv in the past.
Through the report he has

identified the discrepancy in adoption rates as possibly resulting from trans­lations of actual data into carefully phrased re-statements of fact in support of a particular financial or political agenda.

Funny that!
Honesty on the Internet https://i0.wp.com/www.bestproductions.com/jetsterswebsite/images/cybertruth.jpg

DNS unstuck

July 14th, 2008

There has been a serious flaw identified in DNS recently, which may allow an attacker to target an ISP, replacing the entire web with their own content, not good!
DNS, taken by kalleboo at Flickr http://flickr.com/photos/kalleboo/
More can be seen from Dan Kaminsky Discovers Fundamental Issue In DNS: Massive Multivendor Patch Released .
To save the day we also have the newly created Industry Consortium for the Advancement of Security on the Internet (ICASI), which offer advisories and support.
All of which still has me very worried given that on Wednesday, 3rd December 2008 the .tel TLD will offer a service that allows individuals and businesses to store and manage all their contact information and keywords directly within the Domain Name System (DNS) without the need to build, host or manage a website.
And what about SocialDNS, personal details already retrieved via DNS. go://miguelpdl [Just a Firefox plugin required].

Leading the way 4WARD

February 26th, 2008

So my travels this year started with the kick off meeting for the EU FP7 ICT project 4WARD.
4WARD Logo
We are creating an “Architecture and Design for the Future Internet” and in doing so 4WARD aims to increase the competitiveness of the European networking industry and to improve the quality of life for European citizens by creating a family of dependable and interoperable networks providing direct and ubiquitous access to information.
These future wireless and wireline networks will be designed to be readily adaptable to current and future needs, at acceptable cost. 4WARD’s goal is to make the development of networks and networked applications faster and easier, leading to both more advanced and more affordable communication services.
Hosting this first event were IT Lisbon, and I must say for such a large event they did an excellent job, and it’s not usual I say that, but really the whole event and the 25 course meal were something else.
As for the TSSG we are specifcally looking at Tenet 1: Let 1000 Networks Bloom, in which we are exploring a new approach to a multitude of networks: the best network for each task, each device, each customer, and each technology. We are attempting to create a framework in which it will be easy for many networks to bloom as part of a family of interoperable networks that can co-exist and complement each other.
And Tenet 2: Let Networks Manage Themselves. This were we would like to have a “default-on” management entity, which is an inseparable part of the network itself, generating extra value in terms of guaranteed performance in a cost effective way, and capable of adjusting itself to different network sizes, configurations, and external conditions.
Both activities have got off to a flying start, and we have a number of follow up workshops in the coming weeks. I’ll keep you posted.