My presentation for the Zürich University of Applied Sciences (ZHAW) "Cloud-based Service Platforms for the Future Internet" conference held in Winterthur on 29 November 2012.

1. intercloud
interoperability
Sam Johnston @samj <samj@samj.net>

2. internet
a global network of networks

3. internet protocol (ip)
lingua franca of the internet

4. intercloud
a global cloud of clouds

5. cloud protocol?
lingua franca of the cloud?

6. start with http?
most web services are http based

7. common functionality
encryption, authentication, proxying, load balancing, etc.

8. end up with soap?
simple object access protocol

10. POST /InStock HTTP/1.1
Host: www.example.org
Content-Type: application/soap+xml; charset=utf-8
Content-Length: 299
SOAPAction: "http://www.w3.org/2003/05/soap-envelope"
<?xml version="1.0"?>
<soap:Envelope xmlns:soap="http://www.w3.org/2003/05/soap-envelope">
<soap:Header>
</soap:Header>
<soap:Body>
<m:GetStockPrice xmlns:m="http://www.example.org/stock">
<m:StockName>IBM</m:StockName>
</m:GetStockPrice>
</soap:Body>
</soap:Envelope>

11. transport?
http? smtp?

12. interface?
function calls & returns tbd

13. formats?
data interchange formats tbd

14. complexity
barriers to entry, poor performance, low security, etc.

15. rest
representational state transfer

16. http as intended
interface still tbd

17. http headers?
no need for a new metadata channel

18. metadata
linking, categories, attributes

19. semantic web
eav/cr (entity, attribute, value w/ classes & relationships)

20. occi
open cloud computing interface

21. cloud management
good for new implementations & compatibility layers

22. safe extensibility?
extensions? registries? namespaces? state machines?

23. what do we solve for?
integration? interoperability? compatibility? portability?

24. integration
combining components into an overall system

25. interoperability
ability to exchange and use information

26. compatibility
ability to share the same environment

27. portability
migration of components between environments

28. how do we solve it?
open source? open standards?

29. open source
uses copyrights to open products

30. open cloud
uses standard formats & interfaces to open services

31. internet email
lowest common denominator

32. smtp
simple mail transfer protocol

33. client access?
out of scope (e.g. outlook to exchange)

34. management?
out of scope (e.g. mmc to exchange)

35. portability?
out of scope (e.g. attachments)

36. mail transfer
in scope (e.g. exchange to lotus notes)

37. simple
lowest common denominator

38. swtp?
simple workload transfer protocol?

39. workloads
virtual machines, database snapshots, queue states, etc.

40. transport
hypertext transfer protocol (http)

41. portability
internet media types (e.g. application/ovf)

42. discovery
/robots.txt » /.well-known/ (rfc5785)? json-home?

43. enumeration?
text/uri-list? xml? json?

44. annotation?
“semantic” http headers? json? xml? in-band?

45. performance?
premature optimisation - O(1) vs O(n+1)

46. migration?
http move, copy, pass-thru authentication, etc.

47. workload formats?
out of scope (but still critical)

48. proprietary formats?
dmtf’s ovf ~= microsoft’s word doc?

49. virtual machines
simple disk image + attributes format