EE Times: MOC Featured at MIT Cloud Workshop
Hosted by the Industry-Academia Partnership, the MIT Cloud Workshop on September 29, 2014 highlighted “Open Innovation” initiatives such as IBM’s OpenPower Ecosystem and the Institute-affiliated Massachusetts Open Cloud to an audience of industry experts, academics, and students. Orran Krieger, Research Professor of Computer Science and Faculty Fellow of the Hariri Institute for Computing, presented a talk on the dangers of today’s single-provider clouds and offered a solution: the Open Cloud eXchange. The Open Cloud eXchange is a “public cloud marketplace” envisioned by both Krieger and Institute Founding Director Azer Bestavros that will provide an alternative model for cloud computing.
“Today’s clouds are owned, operated, and controlled by a single provider, and those companies — you know who they are — are highly secretive about how they do their innovation,” said Orran Krieger, founding director of the Center for Cloud Innovation (CCI) at Boston University.
The consequences, he said, are severe. “We can’t innovate. Performance-sensitive applications are locked out because one can’t analyze what’s in the funnel. Worse yet, because these companies all have their own data platforms, when people try to innovate above the cloud data platform their stuff performs terribly, because they can’t optimize across these layers.”
Security is another beast.
“In the area of healthcare privacy, for example, existing cloud providers say, ‘If there is a breech in this layer we will pay the cost, but if there is penetration above this layer you pay,’ ” said Krieger. “That’s not the best security practice. Ideally, you want to audit the entire stack, but today there’s very little insight into how they are operating.”
Stakes are high in the cloud arena because a lot of people believe that in the future on-demand access to inexpensive computational capacity — i.e., paying for what you use — will be the model that dominates, potentially eliminating the need for personal computers.
Frustrated at what they see as a cloud model that stifles innovation, Krieger and fellow BU professor Azer Bestavros envision a new model — a kind of public cloud marketplace they call the Open Cloud eXchange (OCX) in which an ecosystem of companies would jointly participate in implementing and operating the cloud.