Engineering for a Trustworthy Cloud
Wednesday October 6, 2010, 3:00 pm in MCS 135
Speaker: Jim Miller, Microsoft
Abstract: Engineering is a combination of science, economics, and timing. For the most part, things move along with a steady pace of incremental innovation enlarging existing markets, lowering costs, and opening new markets. But periodically all three underpinnings move in unison and there is a flowering of innovation to locate and grow on a new equilibrium point. As with all the previous innovation/disruptions the transition to The Cloud will draw on what we already know, but it takes place under unique conditions that will force us to create new engineering processes and redirect the energies of existing disciplines. It is easy as engineers to concentrate on the obvious issues of building a system to the scale envisioned by a public cloud offering, and this is critically important work. But scale is only one dimension on which a disruptive change has taken place in the environment. The other disruptive change is that these cloud systems are part of a global critical infrastructure, and one that will inevitably become as much part of daily life as have water, transportation, energy, and telecommunications systems.
Just like these other infrastructures, The Cloud will come in many forms (trains, planes, automobiles, public, private, on-premise and government clouds). In exchange for legal protections (spam and virus generation as forms of fraud or theft, binding contracts with digital signatures) there will be regulations (network neutrality, data portability). Business models will require service level agreements that will alter engineering investments (data corruption and insider attacks will have dramatic financial and potentially legal consequences). The engineering challenge, then, is to identify what is required to provide a system that can be operated reliably, globally, and inexpensively at scale, with the kinds of security, auditing, and privacy controls that will give consumers, companies, and governments a sense of trust in the overall system.
Short Bio: Jim Miller, Sr. Director of Technology Policy and Strategy, works in the office of the CTO to understand the implications of technology trends on society and public policy five or more years into the future. His goal is to establish a set of global conversations around these implications to clarify policy objectives and ensure that technology, legislation, and regulation can function together to achieve them.
Jim was previously a Partner Architect on Microsoft’s Developer Frameworks (DevFX) and Common Language Runtime (CLR) teams. He worked on architectural changes to allow innovation in the core of the CLR and the managed Frameworks while preserving backward compatibility. He also served as liaison with the academic, research, and compiler communities.
Jim holds a PhD in Computer Science from MIT and served on the faculty at Brandeis University as well as on the research staff at MIT. He has been on the research staff at Digital Equipment Corporation and the Open Software Foundation. Before joining Microsoft, he was on the senior management team of the World Wide Web Consortium, reporting to Tim Berners-Lee and in charge of work on security, electronic commerce, child protection, privacy protection, accessibility, and intellectual property protection.
Jim joined Microsoft in 1998, leading the program management team for the kernel of the .NET Common Language Runtime (CLR). His responsibility included garbage collection, metadata definition and file formats, intermediate language (IL) definition, IL-to-native code compilation, and remote objects. He also serves as editor for ECMA TC39/TG3, which is charged with creating an international standard for a Common Language Infrastructure. To validate this standard, Jim helped create the Shared Source CLI (also known as Rotor), a complete implementation of the standard, runnable on Windows, Macintosh, and Unix operating systems, available in source form for teaching and non-commercial purposes.
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