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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