I have accepted Basheer Janjua’s invitation to participate to this CTO Forum hosted by Fujitsu in Sunnyvale. I took on the double duty of being a panelist and a session leader. I really liked Andy Bechtolsheim’s keynote. He’s quite excited about Clouds (“they are the biggest thing since the Web”) and the macro-economic conditions playing in favor of cloud adoption. I chaired the session on Accountability, Compliance, Reliability and Security in the ‘Cloud’. To kick-off the discussion, I used some of the slides that I presented at the Cisco Symposium a few days earlier. The ensuing dialogue in the room reflected the diverse viewpoints and pain points, which span the whole spectrum of people + process + technology + information (as a technologist, I know that I tend to over-emphasize the technology angle).

Fresh from election night celebrations, I spent two days at an excellent workshop organized by Flavio Bonomi’s research team at Cisco, for researchers and industry leaders to mix and together pierce through Clouds. I really enjoyed seeing Vint Cerf (for a second I was asked to give the plenary address on his behalf while he was delayed in traffic … luckily he made it in at the very last call), Randy Katz, Kubi, Bob Grossman, Stephen Savage, Bruce Davie, Monica Lam.

Vint gave a stellar (pun intended) overview of the IP-based store-and-forward protocols now used in deep space explorations. What a great story of technology re-use. With regard to the topic du-jour, he drew an analogy between Internet early days and Cloud early days, and went on to propose a set of inter-cloud themes. My recollection of Internet early days is that (D)ARPA played a pivotal role in setting up a super-partes agenda and funding the same, long before it became a trillion dollar affair (and the Wellfleet and Cisco began duking it out at the IETF). Thus, I asked Vint and the crowd, what is the equivalent of (D)ARPA’s in the highly commercialized and ever-so-hyped Cloud journey? Has the Cloud geenie come out of the bottle all too soon?

I gave this presentation which succinctly summarizes eBay’s scale-out journey and lays out some banana peels (Faux PaaS ) in Cloud Computing that we must steer clear from.