Intercloud is coming

I've been running around the world talking about Intercloud for well over a year now. I'm thankful that companies such as Cisco, and now Huawei, have been supportive in this adventure. Just as interoperability between the global Carriers of IP traffic, the result of which we now call the "Internet", the interoperability of Cloud Computingis an important development which needs to occur, and that's what I call "the Intercloud".

I am happy to report that the concept of the Intercloud is finally picking up steam!

First off, it was great to see that somebody wrote a Wikipedia entry for Intercloud (no it wasn't me!), which you can see here. You will notice that the first official reference to the work Intercloud in the Wikipedia entry, is the paper I wrote with my team at Cisco. If you want to read the whole paper, and also see related presentations and so on, please check it out at my consulting site here.

The end of the year was quite active for me on the Intercloud front, as I was fortunate enough to keynote address on the subject at the 6th IFIP International Conference on Network and Parallel Computing (NPC 2009), October 19-21, 2009, in Gold Coast, Australia; and then another keynote at IARIA's First International Conferences on Advanced Service Computing SERVICE COMPUTATION 2009, November 15-20, 2009, in Athens/Glyfada, Greece. I gave similar talks at both events, you can download the talk here.

But the big end of the year wrap-up, was the mecca of all the Cloud Standards people getting together in Long Beach, at a Cloud Standards Workshop hosted by OMG. The event agenda can be seen here. What a great line-up of many of the grooups working on different angles of the Cloud Standards problem.

Two very important groups have stepped forward, especially focused on the Intercloud problem, are of particular interest to me (as an Intercloud guy).

The first is a group I've been working with for some time, called the Open Cloud Consortium. They finally announced an Intercloud Workgroup! This is an idea we've been working on for some time, where Open Cloud Testbed could be used to host some Root Intercloud services. This is especially exciting as the testbed is the same physical infrastructure as the National Lambda Rail project and has ties with the next generation Internet. I hope to be able to publish more info on this as soon as it is available.

The next group of interest is the newly announced Global Inter-Cloud Technology Task Force, started in Tokyo, and expanding globally. They have picked up the work on Intercloud and have gotten support from carriers in the Asia-Pac region to really take this forward. They describe some of the charter and work here. I'll bee teaming with them also to progress the Intercloud in Asia-Pac.

So the year closes with great progress on the Intercloud. I hope 2010 shows as much progress.