MOC Featured at MIT Cloud Workshop

“Open Innovation” was a strong theme running through the MIT Cloud Workshop held on September 29, 2014. Hosted by The Industry-Academia Partnership (IAP), the event featured talks on a range of nascent initiatives including the Massachusetts Open Cloud Initiative and IBM’s OpenPower Ecosystem.

“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.

“The idea seemed really naïve when I first thought about it,” said Krieger. “How would we build a model whereby each service provider determines how to charge for their services, operational data would be visible among stakeholders, customers can select and move between services, and academics and researchers could freely innovate?”

Naïve, possibly. But their idea is now one step closer to reality, through the Massachusetts Open Cloud (MOC) project. Founding vendor partners include Cisco, EMC, Red Hat, Juniper Networks, Dell, and Mathworks.

The first big technical challenge will be in building up that infrastructure. “We want people to use what they want to use, but the way things work today is based on the assumption that one landlord stands up the whole cloud,” said Krieger. “We have to find a model whereby different partners own different pieces of the cloud.”

At the conclusion of the talk, an attendee asked whether the OCX cloud framework would provide better insight on operational data, so that his company could perform more analytics on the data.

“That’s why I created OCX,” said Kreiger. “If all this computing is going to the cloud, and we can’t actually see inside of it, then a lot of our research becomes irrelevant.”