I moderated a panel about the Future of Cloud Computing July 9 at the Federal Cloud Computing Summit.
The three excellent panelists were:
- Amol Deshpande, an Associate Professor in the Department of Computer Science, University of Maryland,
- Grace Lewis, a Senior Member of the Technical Staff, Software Engineering Institute, Carnegie Mellon, University, and
- John Messina, a Computer Scientist, at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST).
Each of them had a slightly different focus which made the conversation pretty interesting.
Deshpande has been doing research into how to do big data analytics using clouds, optimizing data management, and figuring out how to manage operations in clouds to meet performance standards. Lewis focus on the issues of small clouds which she referred to as cloudlets (and which I called baby clouds). Messina is working on the next version of the very important NIST cloud reference architecture and has been active in working with other countries on international standards associated with clouds.
When I have moderated or been on panels dealing with this subject in the past much of the discussion was focused on the user interface to services being provided in a cloud. This panel however spent a lot of time with the issues that went on inside a cloud or between clouds. For example Lewis mentioned that the future is not going to be on mobile cloud computing (mobile, e.g. smart phone, to cloud) but rather will be on the development of intermediary capabilities that will sit between a mobile device and the cloud to improve the overall experience. Messina said that 80% of all cloud services will be consumed by other cloud services.
For another take on the panel, here is an article in fedscoop.