J.P. Rangaswamy is British Telecom’s chief scientist and a very interesting fellow. At the Cloud Summit at OSCON last month he delivered a talk on the future of the cloud. I was quite intrigued so I grabbed him during the break to learn a bit more about a few of the concepts he presented.
Some of the topics that J.P. tackles:
- Many of the best utilities we’ve built: Internet, Web, wireless environment etc are built on fundamentally frail best-effort infrastructures.
- In order to gain predictability you sacrifice a lot of the original value eg. QWERTY
- He’s not against SLAs, J.P.’s against the throwing away of value under the guise of false beliefs in SLAs.
- What is the key area in the cloud that needs to be shored up? Interoperability. Security is overplayed, just look at the development of the Web.
- Need to concentrate on federation as a mind set — the ability to create services that are daisy chaining select pieces from a variety of each, vs integrated vertical stacks.
- He’s worried about SLAs because the things people are doing to stop SLAs from being light weight are actually things that prevent interoperability.
Pau for now…