Miguel PdL

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?

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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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.

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No its not a round of the F1 calendar, but an assembly gathering of European researchers contributing to the vision of the Future Internet.

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.

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.

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!

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!

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].