Useful Cloud Resources and Links

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Good Introductory and Overview Resources

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Industry Groups and Standards

Cloud Computing Interoperability Forum (CCIF) - supports all groups working to solve issues related to Cloud Computing Interoperability.

Cloud Standards Group - Established in March 2009 by the Cloud Computing Community, the group is working on documenting high level standards from the consensus of successful cloud computing offerings, starting with a Cloud Platform Reference Architecture.

Distributed Management Task Force - This group will focus on virtual machine formats building on OVF, groups of virtual machines (deployment groups), and VM Mobility. Lets hope they can get constituencies from VMware ESX, Redhat KVM, Citrix XEN, Oracle XEN, Amazon AMI/XEN, to a place where people can write tools that can easily work with all these

FreeIPA - An open source project which combines many of the "root" functions a cloud interoperability federation might need such as DNS, Certificate Authority, LDAP, and NTP. Leverages the trusty and fast Netscape/iPlanet LDAP server. Fedora community.

Global InterCloud Task Force  -  This group, based in Japan, is a carrier-centric group looking to further specifically interoperability cloud-to-cloud through international cooperation and standards development. In my mind very important as it is one of the few groups focused in Intercloud.

Internet Engineering Task Force - IETF produce the RFC's which underly the Internet. For cloud there are several relevant efforts including LISP (a mobile IP addressing proposal, needed for VM Mobility and XMPP, a protocol for clouds to talk to each other upon).

Liberty Alliance - a widely accepted SAML-centric identity and authentication industry association with good interface documents and reference open source. Probably a good source for Cloud identity and authentiaction approaches

Network Centric Operations - This is a group of US Govt and Govt contractors who for a long time have ben pioneers of realtime, distributed systems use for Command, Control, Communications and Intelligence (C3I). A subgroup believes that Cloud Computing is important moving forward and would like to see standard interfaces to clouds. Some folks from SRI and The Aerospace Corporation are the ones particularly interested in Cloud.

Object Management Group - The OMG does not have a Cloud effort proper, is my understanding. However, the NCOIC guys are having a "Cloud Interoperability Session" in DC which they approached the OMG to help them run.

Open Cloud Consortium - The OCC was started by a group in Univ. of Illinios who are focused on large scale data mining and business intelligence problems. They are one of many Universities to leverage the National Lambda Rail project which is dark fiber which goes around North America to be used for high speed networking research. They have done good work in researching more efficeint protocols for distributed fast high latency networks for which TCP is not great, their project is called UCI and is in wide use for these kinds of use cases.

Open Cirrus - HP/Intel/Yahoo! Open Cloud Computing Research Testbed

Open Cloud Manifesto - IBM and other tech companies have issued a statement of principles that calls for keeping cloud computing services as open as possible.

Open Grid Forum - Open Grid Forum has been around some time and is a formal standards body for development of grids and parallel programming models. I believe they have some realtionship with the Globus Alliance. Recently the OGF officially launches working group to create an API for cloud infrastructure services.

Open Group - Open Group is the former X/Open, who now have enterprise software architecture tools and best practices and conferences. They have recently concentrated on SOA enablement for large enterprises and have an enterprise architecture called The Open Group Architecture Framework (TOGAF). Recnetly they have hosted speakers about Cloud Interoperability as Cloud and SOA from an enteprise perspective overlap.

Storage Networking Industry Association - SNIA has an effort going to think about Cloud Storage standards 

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Amazon Web Services Docs

Amazon Web Services Site - Amazon is arguably the thought leader and poster child for Cloud Computing, lots of fundamental technical information on Amazons site

Programming Amazon Web Services O'Reilly book - Great first level Programming Guide

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Google App-engine Site

Google App Engine Site - Google has just announced Java runtime support (in addition to Python), a very important development around cloud

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Microsoft Azure - The Cloud Service launched by Microsoft, worth a very in-depth look, probably the most comprehensive cloud environment from within which to write new kinds of software

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VMware Materials

VMware "VCloud" Materials from VMware - Lots of VMware centric materials where they position their virtualization as Cloud. Some of this is more marketing than actuality but worth a read

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IBM Cloud Computing Project

IBM's Main Cloud Computing Page - IBM has done tremendous work in the Cloud Comouting field and formed a division for this space, extremely good reading

IBM's Cloud "Service Management" (Tivoli) - Cloud Resources Page, good reading

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Hypervisors

XEN - The Open Source Project, this VM is used by almost every cloud

XEN- From Citrix - Citrix also has several Cloud resources

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Hadoop Projects

Apache Hadoop Open Source Project - Apache Foundation project covering the Hadoop Distributed Filesystem as well as several additional add-on projects, very high activity

Hadoop and Distributed Computing at Yahoo! - Yahoo also has a very active research and open source project and a distribution, a must visit for Hadoop developers

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Open Source Clouds

Eucalyptus - an open source, Amazon AWS "clone" which uses Linux and XEN

Ubuntu - their Eucalyptus distribution

Red Hat - is putting together a bunch of parts to create a Cloud OS

Project Reservoir - a European Grid research project which has morphed into Cloud

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Other Interesting Cloud Companies

SUN Cloud Project - who knows where this will go with the Oracle acquisition, although SUN did Open Source some Cloud API's and seems very active

Enomaly - Thought leadership from a startuip building a Cloud OS

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Cloud Blogs

Elastic Vapor

Cloud Musings

The Wisdom of Clouds

Business Driven Architect

Gartner Cloud Blog

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