IBM Altocumulus: A Cross-Cloud Middleware and Platform

Cloud computing has become the new face of computing and promises to offer virtually unlimited, cheap, readily available, utility type computing resources. Many vendors have entered this market with different offerings ranging from infrastructure-as-a-service such as Amazon, to fully functional platform services such as Google App Engine. However, as a result of this heterogeneity, deploying applications to a cloud and managing them needs to be done using vendor specific methods. This lock in is seen as a major hurdle in adopting cloud technologies to the enterprise. IBM Altocumulus, the cloud middleware platform from IBM Almaden Services Research, aims to solve this very issue of managing applications across multiple clouds. It provides a uniform, service oriented interface to deploy and manage applications in various clouds and also provides facilities to migrate instances across clouds using repeatable best practice patterns. In this demonstration we will present the latest version of the IBM Altocumulus platform and also reveal some of the latest additions on scaling and the ability to perform map-reduce type computations

Toward Cloud-Agnostic Middlewares

Cloud computing is a natural progression of service-oriented architecture. The Web as the platform: data with Web 2.0, programming and development with mashups, and deployments and resource provisioning with cloud computing. However, the Web was not necessarily designed to be an on-demand compute platform and infrastructure and certainly not designed to be a network for data centers which is what it is displacing with cloud computing. What are the challenges to advance cloud computing? For example, how do users of compute clouds make efficient usage of the heterogeneous nature of the Web and specifically of the choices between potentially engaging with public clouds versus creating enterprise private clouds, or some hybrid combination thereof? Additionally, since there are usually no single answers, due to a variety of compute workload demands, how should cloud providers and cloud users harvest, create, and utilize best practices in this new platform, thereby encouraging improvements in cloud engagements