A ROADMAP TO CLOUD COMPUTING COLLABORATION BETWEEN JAPAN AND THE EU

Transcription

1 A ROADMAP TO CLOUD COMPUTING COLLABORATION BETWEEN JAPAN AND THE EU Authors: Lutz Schubert (University of Ulm), Takeshi Motohashi (Internet Multifeed CO.)

2 A ROADMAP TO CLOUD COMPUTING COLLABORATION BETWEEN JAPAN AND THE EU Report for the SUCRE project Authors: Lutz Schubert (University of Ulm), Takeshi Motohashi (Internet Multifeed CO.)

3 TABLE OF CONTENTS Towards a common Japan EU cloud environment...[4] I. Introduction...[7] II. Economic Relevance of Cloud Computing for Japan & EU...[8] III. Opportunities & Vision for a Common Cloud Market...[11] A. Potential Use Cases...[12] 1. Mobile Users...[12] 2. Prosumers...[14] 3. SME Collaboration...[16] 4. Public Sector...[16] 5. System Integrator...[17] B. Additional Opportunities...[17] 1. Federated Infrastructures...[17] 2. Improved Quality of Service and Responsiveness...[18] 3. Security & Privacy / Protection...[18] C. Long Term Vision...[19] D. Related Areas...[19] IV. Analysis & Gaps...[21] A. Shared Challenges for Regional and Transregional Clouds...[22] 1. Availability, Latency & Bandwidth...[22] 2. Software Engineering...[23] 3. Distribution, Sharing, Consistency, Reliability...[23] 4. Heterogeneity, Performance, Energy...[23] B. Challenges towards a Common Cloud...[24] 1. Accessibility and Interoperability...[24] 2. Personalisation...[25] 3. Availability...[25] 4. Policy and Legislative Concerns...[26] V. An R&D Roadmap to a Common Cloud Market...[28] Step 1: establishing the base capabilities & requirements for transregional clouds...[28] Step 2: first transregional federated infrastructures...[29] Step 3: full usability of transregional clouds...[31] VI. Recommendations...[32] References...[33] [3]

4 TOWARDS A COMMON JAPAN EU CLOUD ENVIRONMENT CLOUDS ARE NO REGIONAL PHENOMENA constrained to a specific region. As a successor of traditional internet provisioning, it spans the whole world. Accordingly, any service offered over the cloud must principally be equally available in any region no matter whether storage, computing or specific software: a common global cloud environment. However, as the cloud extends the capabilities of the pure internet infrastructure and at the same time due to its economically driven incentives, such as common cloud environment is not easily achieved: not only do the cultural and legislative conditions differ, leading to policy, security and usability problems, but already just the underlying technical infrastructure, including resources, networks and in particular service interfaces may differ strongly, leading to the obvious necessity to cater for interoperability and portability between the regional resources. But also just the distance between the countries causes major technical problems that arise from the availability and sharing expectations of the cloud. As such, just due to the latency and bandwidth constraints between such two regions as Japan and EU data consistency of shared data can simply not be achieved in a satisfying speed. Similarly, people travelling between the two regions will experience a major lag in accessing their data and services leading a huge degradation of quality of experience. Such problems cannot simply be overcome by further network improvements, but are inherently due to the distance and nature of the setup in the first instance. As data size and number of people actively sharing data increase, the problem is exponentially becoming a major impact on quality of experience, development and maintenance effort, and thus steadily decrease the effective return of investment. In order to overcome this problem, substantial changes to the way we write and execute applications [4]

5 TOWARDS A COMMON JAPAN EU CLOUD ENVIRONMENT on the cloud, and how we handle data etc. need to be addressed. This implies aspects such as new data-oriented software engineering approaches which cater for the distribution and sharing of data from grounds up. By nature, addressing these concerns is not only beneficial for the collaboration and federation between such distant regions as Japan and the EU, but also can lead to substantial performance and quality of experience improvements within each region. As such, for example the availability, reliability and consistency of data already causes problems in the cloud on regional level. Any approach that goes beyond the current simple iterative improvements will hence be automatically a substantial game changer and competitive advantage to both regions. Similar arguments apply to security, availability, federation, interoperability etc. A collaboration between Japan the European Union is hence not only of advantage for any collaborative purposes, but also for each region itself. What is more, both regions can substantially benefit from the experience and knowledge of the respective other region, as e.g. research and development on EU level has led to considerable advantages in algorithmic theory, performance-driven optimisation (HPC), software engineering models etc. whereas Japan is leading in adaptive computing, sensor-expertise and exploiting resources efficiently (embedded systems) etc. This document identifies a series of individual research and development actions that need to be tackled across the two regions in order to realise the vision of a common cloud environment. In order to keep the impact from policy and legislative issues at a minimum, the recommended actions furthermore concentrate first on use cases that are of interest and benefit for individual users, or users that are less affected and concerned by legal issues the first phase therefore builds the technological capa- bility basis. In a second phase the technical advances will have to be used in a fashion that they can address (rather than change) the legal and policy issues (such as data protection, localisation). And only in a final, third phase the long-term problems, such as economic models, paradigm shifts in computing and the policy concerns will have to be solved by nature of the complexity of these concerns, this necessitates that the according aspects are approached [5]

6 TOWARDS A COMMON JAPAN EU CLOUD ENVIRONMENT early, though. Accordingly the following aspects should be tackled independently of the roadmap right away: #1 Identification of legislative constraints & general concerns #2 New software engineering principles beyond Turing, including composition and decomposition of functional and non-functional properties #3 Personalised, cultural-independent (or adaptive) human-user-interfaces #4 Consistency and reliability #5 Business and economic models #6 Migration strategies and best use recommendations for transregional environments The concrete research and technical development steps identified are: PHASE #1: establishing the base capabilities & requirements for trans-regional clouds #1 Interoperability and portability across infrastructures and between services & platforms #2 Federation of control & interaction mechanisms #3 Locality control of services and data PHASE #2: first trans-regional federated infrastructures #4 Federated and adaptive hosting & execution of applications #5 Adaptive user interfaces, form factors #6 Network as a cloud: to optimize not only computing resource but also network toward cloud availability and scalability #7 Scalability and de-scalability with interoperability PHASE #3: full usability of trans-regional clouds #8 Controlled automated adaptation and decomposition #9 Programmability, migration strategies #10 Business models and best use recommendations [6]

7 I. INTRODUCTION CLOUD COMPUTING HAS BECOME THE GLOBAL STANDARD for service and infrastructure provisioning. The capability to adapt the layout and provisioned instances on basis of usage has made it the most appropriate means for optimising resource utilisation and thus reducing cost. Fast availability of data and services at minimal cost are the main added value points of cloud computing, making it particularly interesting for social networks and mobile users. As the world opens up its borders and more and more users share data from all over the world, or travel all across the globe, data access, respectively communication becomes an increasing problem to maintain performance. Data and computing has to become increasingly agile, adaptive and interoperable, at the same time creating an increasing amount of legislative and security concerns. These problems obviously concern all regions equally, with differences mainly in terms of what kind of effort has been previously invested into compatibility between the respective regions. The European Union and Japan strive for improving this compatibility, with one specific aim being the provisioning of a common internet / cloud environment, which enables a common market exchange between the two regions and supports its industrial and personal users. This document elaborates why and how such an effort should be undertaken. To this end, section II investigates the current market situation in both regions and the respective relevance of cloud computing. Section III identifies the commonalities of these markets and tries to elaborate opportunities for common cloud-related market, i.e. a future Japan-EU cloud vision, including a set of potential use cases. This vision will be analysed with respect to its current technical & non-technical requirements and barriers in section IV. Finally, section V will sketch out a common roadmap towards this vision with respect to technical R&D work that should be performed separately and in common across the regions. This document concludes with a set of general recommendations towards generation of an according R&D programme. [7]

8 II. ECONOMIC RELEVANCE OF CLOUD COMPUTING FOR JAPAN & EU THE FUTURE IS ONLINE AND MOBILE: not only are more and more business services offered over the web, such as , retail, media, automation etc., but also private usage increases constantly, with more and more users expecting to get access to their data and services anytime anywhere, ranging from work related tasks to private contacts, social sharing etc. This is a worldwide phenomenon, as the internet penetration rate grows, as can be seen from Figure 1. Internet Penetration Rate (individuals with access in percent) * Per 100 inhabitants Africa Arab States Asia & Pacific CIS Europe The Americas Figure 1: Internet penetration rate. Source: ITU World Telecommunication/ICT Indicators database. [8]

9 II. ECONOMIC RELEVANCE OF CLOUD COMPUTING FOR JAPAN & EU Over the last years, the market for Software as a Service has increased by 60% [PWC14], and according to all forecasts, the market is expected to continue to grow in the near future at a tremendous rate [COL12]. For example, Gartner is predicting IaaS and PaaS to grow to $35.5B by 2016 [GAR12], and IDC projects the revenue for enterprise cloud applications to reach $11.0B in 2016 [IDC12]. By 2014, 14M jobs are expected to have been generated globally by the cloud according to [HAU12]. At the same time, mobility and the usage of smart devices for constant connectivity is expected to grow at an even higher rate with predictions for the Internet of Things to reach a revenue of $756.8 billion by 2024 [VIS14] according to VisionGain. The number of people leaving their home country to study and work abroad, sometimes even commuting across frontiers is constantly increasing. For example the number of mobile students in the Erasmus program along have reached 3 million by 2013 [EC12], the number of immigrants and emigrants to the UK alone rose to and , respectively in 2010 and the number of registered foreign nationals in Japan has doubled from 1990 to 2011, reaching 2.07 Million [IOM12]. Similar figures apply to all countries, including the United States. Reasons are manifold and though in most cases the migration follows the employment chances, education, repatriation and retirement also play major roles. Commercial service exports grows continuously, specifically within Europe but also with Asia [UNCTAD14]. According to CorpWatch the top 500 multinational corporations account for 70 percent of trade worldwide with this percentage steadily increasing over the past twenty years [STWR08]. The main point being that, as obstacles for cross-border operation decrease, the number of such exchange increases. As an implication of that, such cooperation, exchange and collaboration requires that the necessary supporting tools and services are in place one of the key ones being the internet. With the collaboration within the European being already strong, the next obstacle arises from the growing exchange between Asia, and currently particularly Japan, and the European Union. [9]

10 II. ECONOMIC RELEVANCE OF CLOUD COMPUTING FOR JAPAN & EU Japan Market expectation toward cloud services becomes higher because of its cost efficiency and flexibility. Mainly major cloud services are not only from Japan but also from US and EU and platforms are selected with both proprietary and open source based, so many types and combinations of cloud services are mingled. In terms of market expansion from Japan, we see Asia as well as US and EU, so Japan is also becoming to have same issues with EU near future and have many thing from EU market. Scale of Economy and software as a service deployment empower major global cloud services. So, market expansion to outside country for cloud services is necessary to go. It would be wrong to assume though that the same technical growth and methodologies that applied to support the European growth apply on a larger scale to the integration of Japan and the EU. In fact, the capabilities are already reaching their technical limitations and where first obstacles within the EU arise, the problems to be faced for a Japan-EU integration are increased by many orders of magnitude and technical workarounds do not easily apply anymore. Key problems are thereby posed primarily by the distance and the cultural and legislative differences by the two regions, but also by their technological and infrastructure background. To overcome them, joint investigation of the problem on all levels needs to be performed this is by no means constrained to the political level, but concerns in particular the research and development in the future internet and specifically clouds. We will elaborate this in more detail in section IV.

11 III. OPPORTUNITIES & VISION FOR A COMMON CLOUD MARKET AS NOTED IN THE PRECEDING SECTION, the (market) potential of future clouds & internet of things does not so much rest in the traditional markets related to the regional provisioning of services (including phone, , retail etc.) but in particular in the extension of the services beyond the regional boundaries, i.e. in providing the services dynamically and collaboratively across the globe. As more and more people travel for work and for private purposes, the pressure on providing the same look & feel environment for work and social interactivity on the road increases; social interactions across all countries and continents at any time of the year increases, and even families start to become scattered across the world. Whereas the European level and the challenges within this region are considerably well known and are being tackled, the integration with a distant region at a completely different infrastructural and cultural background opens challenges which will sooner or later affect Europe, too, such as the cultural integration of international residents, but also the sheer problem of size in terms of numbers of users and size of data, which is directly linked to the problem of distance. At the same time, due to the background of Europe and its strong strive to integration of different conditions legislative, technical, political, educational etc. within the same region, Europe like no other is in a position to face these challenges. In addition to this, the geographical position of Europe to Japan reduces the effect of e.g. distance related technical challenges, which means it has better chances to realise fast(er) solutions to these problems than the United States. This gives Europe not only a considerable head-start, but also the potential to open up new and principally untapped markets quicker, such as the collaboration and service based trade between Japan and the rest of the world giving Europe the position of a hub again. [11]

12 III. OPPORTUNITIES & VISION FOR A COMMON CLOUD MARKET By nature of the problem and modern service provisioning (see also chapter II), Cloud computing plays a major role in realising this potential. In the following we will provide an overview over the immediate use cases and therefore market opportunities that will arise naturally from a joint cloud infrastructure between the two regions. We thereby take specific care to reduce use cases that could be hindered by legalistic and policy problems, as they are not likely to be tackled in a short period. Research and development must therefore focus in particular on concern with little such impact and of strong interest by the individual user. It is worth noting that obviously further use cases would arise once the policy issues can be overcome, but this should not hinder technological development. One specific research and development concern therefore obviously consists in avoiding legalistic and policy problems (cf. section IV). [A] POTENTIAL USE CASES As noted, the use cases should centre around the human, individual end-user so as to ensure that the impact of policy and legalistic problems is reduced to a minimum that does not mean that such concerns not still exist (as e.g. in the ehealth use case below), but private persons are generally more willing to share even private data across borders, than companies which rely on data protection. 1. MOBILE USERS The most typical conditions under which exchange across borders occurs, are obviously when the user himself crosses the border. Taking your environment with you With modern environments, he / she will expect continued availability of his / her data and services (cf. section II). As we will note later, this use case at least has the advantage that the interoperability problems between device and service / data is reduced (though infrastructure level interoperability problems increase). [12]

13 III. OPPORTUNITIES & VISION FOR A COMMON CLOUD MARKET Obviously, the user will want not only that he / she has no notably interoperability problems, but also and more importantly that the services and the data are as accessible (in terms of availability), as at home. Due to network constraints, this will almost automatically mean that the data and the services have to be moved with the user, leading to interoperability and latency concerns (as well as potentially payment problems). Tourism Touristic exchange is not new to Europe or Japan and both regions already offer many services to get easy information about transportation, location, tourist attractions etc. However, both regions are so far still primarily concerned with offering the information to the same cultural and technical domain. Whilst roaming certainly has improved and the base systems (device, OS) are mostly interoperable, the representation and integration with existing services is still difficult. As for the user abroad, the tourist would ideally want to have a for him / her natural and intuitive way to get and use the information this includes language, way of interacting, as well as potential integration into existing services that offer similar capabilities in the home region (e.g. MeineStadt for Germany). Health Cases Going hand in hand with the touristic cases, a specific concern that may arise abroad consists in health problems, accidents etc. the problems are all not new to the medical profession, but in general, the person has to be prepared in advance for the case abroad (such as taking an allergic pass with him / her etc.). This is however not always feasible (accident), and also not necessarily helpful, if language barriers and medical terminologies are not conform. Moreover, the information may be incomplete for the specific case. In principle, the user should always be allowed to get access to his / her own medical information, and therefore either grant this access to other people, or take the according information with him / her and keep it secure, whilst yet still being able to pass it to e.g. a medical doctor. [13]

14 III. OPPORTUNITIES & VISION FOR A COMMON CLOUD MARKET Notably, this is partially a policy / legalistic concern, but involves technical issues which need to support policy makers in their decisions (such as secure connections etc.) Home away from home People moving abroad for employment purposes frequently still have families and social ties in their home country they don t want to be left out and want to be informed of what is happening politically, socially etc. Many social networks exist that at least allow families to keep in contact, though distance impacts on quality, degree of exchange etc. and should be improved. Moreover, few regions offer dedicated information and services for people abroad, though e.g. remote voting, condensed news etc. are on the rise and subject to investigation. Frequently enough, the problems are more technical than legalistic, ranging from identification to preparing and pushing the information, as well as most importantly lacking expertise and capabilities. 2. PROSUMERS The end-user in the cloud / internet is no longer constrained to being a pure consumer. With the rise of IPV6, easy outsourcing and site hosting, retail supporters such as BigCommerce, ETSY, ebay, Amazon, market spaces such as Google Play, Apple Store etc. users are empowered to offer services, products and goods of their own making, and also by integrating existing ones worldwide: Offering Services Apps and non-professional services can already be offered to regions abroad with comparatively little effort thanks to the global availability of standard operating systems and common marketplaces, local services are principally available globally. However, this does not imply that locality issues, let alone the consequences from regional preferences and conditions are properly addressed. It also constrains the offerings and services to the respective provider (lock-in). [14]

15 III. OPPORTUNITIES & VISION FOR A COMMON CLOUD MARKET Such services also exploit little of the advanced features of clouds, which involve in particular the capabilities to share and exchange resources on all levels. Instead, they are typically co-located to the user, and this also only, if according data centers exist in the same area. Integrating Services Similar problems occur when a prosumer wants to exploit local services to extend them with specific features or integrate them into his / her own services, which is a market sector of growing interest not only because it reduces the development effort, but also because it means that existent services will get enhanced capabilities. This is already difficult enough with individual services, but in order to address market sectors abroad, regional preferences for services and for interacting with the services have to be considered. Recent trend in integrating services is Web2.0. One of the characteristics of Web2.0 is web-based APIs to allow automated usage, such as by an app or mashup. With combining several sites APIs, richer service can be created and people can provide better services easier with APIs. This trend is also pushing utilizing cloud services. Global Retail, Global Platforms Individual retail through platforms such as BigCommerce by now create a bigger net value than even the biggest players in this market [CLI14]. The United States and Europe are already quite well integrated and in particular global players such as Amazon etc. can offer logistics spanning the whole wide world. Yet for the individual provider, this poses considerable logistics, economic and technical problems, ranging from presenting the goods, over shipping and handling to payment and insurance. As success of platforms such as Rakuten shows, however, there is an interest in trading across frontiers even on a level of the private individual. With little support in place and with even less capabilities to avoid the existing key market players, this is however still a very exclusive and untapped domain. Notably, from a pure logistic position, Europe is in the ideal position to act as a global hub in this context. [15]

16 III. OPPORTUNITIES & VISION FOR A COMMON CLOUD MARKET 3. SME COLLABORATION The prosumer capabilities discussed in the previous sections obviously need to be backed by an according (flexible) network of actual providers. In addition, many of the capabilities are of their own direct commercial interest, such as extending their market share and customer base by offering extended services, reaching a broader audience etc. Many of the capabilities that currently only global players can offer simply for having an infrastructure and data center in place in all according regions, can also principally be achieved through an according collaboration and integration of individual providers in the respective regions. This allows SMEs to increase their outreach, generate a new customer basis, such as tourists and people working abroad that want to take their data and services with them, and compete with the offerings of global market players. At the same time, it offers users a wider range of choice and thus availability and reliability it implies however tight integration and interoperability in a fashion that can be easily addressed and exploited by the developer. 4. PUBLIC SECTOR In general, the public sector has neither the expertise nor the resources to host their own IT server infrastructure ready for the amount of (public) users cloud outsourcing is a major opportunity for the public sector / government to reduce the cost and effort for server maintenance. As mentioned above, citizens of a country are not constrained to a specific region, and thus access to the services and data should ideally be not either. To this area also belongs the medical sector and its according data and services (cf. health cases, above). Due to the type and nature of such data, however, it must be well protected and secured. Access may only allow partial data, depending on location, or additional identification mechanisms. In all cases, security and adaptation to legalistic concerns is a prerogative. [16]

17 III. OPPORTUNITIES & VISION FOR A COMMON CLOUD MARKET Though many countries and cities (within the EU / Japan) even struggle on national level, the lessons learned on either side, as well as the obstacles encountered will prove beneficial. What is more, an approach that considers international, rather than just national interoperability from grounds up offers more long-term sustainability and relevance. 5. SYSTEM INTEGRATOR In Japan market, major cloud service providers try to let customers understand how cloud services are cost effective. Enterprises find the issue of migration from legacy on premise system to cloud service, when they decide to move into cloud. Not only public cloud services but also private cloud services are target for migration. So, hybrid Cloud operation, which means using both public and private cloud services, is also an issue. [B] ADDITIONAL OPPORTUNITIES Next to the concrete use cases identified in the preceding section, there is yet another major opportunity to be gained from a collaboration between Japan and the EU: the exchange and exploitation of expertise. As partially indicated in the preceding sections, the results from collaboration can also benefit the regions individually e.g. increased federation with foreign infrastructures, also improves federation capabilities within a region etc. This gives rise to a set of extended regional use cases, such as: 1. FEDERATED INFRASTRUCTURES Federation between Japan and the European Union in terms of common cloud hosting capabilities needs to be addressed on multiple levels. The first and foremost concern obviously relates to the interoperability and portability, so as to enable the movement and execution of services and data across frontiers. Interoperability and portability do not apply only to the services and their interfaces, but also to the underlying middleware, which needs to expose a comparable degree and capability of [17]

18 III. OPPORTUNITIES & VISION FOR A COMMON CLOUD MARKET control, monitoring etc. but also quality assurance implying that the respective hosts can be compared on such levels. In addition to that, methods for sign-on, for auditing and payment need to be compatible, or at least commonly agreed on. Common API will be necessary for such compatibility. This also implies that an according common cost model, or at least cost communication to the user is in place. This can equally involve fixed contracts, as well as in-app-payments, as long as both infrastructure and services are prepared for it. 2. IMPROVED QUALITY OF SERVICE AND RESPONSIVENESS By extending the available resource infrastructure and in particular their outreach across regions, a generally improved quality of experience can be provided. This is obviously true for users that move between the regions and thus are granted access to resources immediately available (cf. above), but also holds true for within the region alone, too. To coordinate the difference of service level agreement (SLA) between clouds among regions will also become an issue to keep quality of service for users. Solutions that are able to deal with the availability requirements across regions, with hard constraints on latency, bandwidth etc. will automatically improve the local provisioning and implicitly the resource utilisation, too. The federation capabilities will support local and highly interoperable cloud bursting and similar scenarios; and finally, the extension with interregional providers and mechanisms to distributed services / data according to the availability criteria, extends the general resource pool. Thanks to the temporal differences between the two regions, the potential conflict of resource usage peaks is also considerably low. 3. SECURITY & PRIVACY / PROTECTION Addressing the problems involved in security & privacy protection across one single legal boundary and by opening the infrastructure to more users, will automatically lead to better mechanisms for authentication, data protection, anonymisation etc. all from which the individual regions benefit strongly, in particular when taking data [18]

19 III. OPPORTUNITIES & VISION FOR A COMMON CLOUD MARKET sensitive use cases (industry, egovernment) into consideration. [C] LONG TERM VISION The long term expectations for a trans-regional cloud environment are that any data or service cannot only freely move across the infrastructure, but more importantly that they can always be fully controlled so that they adhere to the overarching functional and non-functional properties (including security concerns, legislative issues etc.). It should also be possible to easily incorporate services from different sources into new applications or exploit for different purposes, as well as to easily adapt the overall application behaviour and configuration to meet the changing requirements in both regions (including usage, location of providers and consumers etc.) [D] RELATED AREAS Big Data Analysis: As many data and information from human and machine become huge and cloud computing resources becomes cheaper, there is a new criterion which arises as beneficial; big data. With analysing big data, we can find a lot of knowledge that we do not know before. Collecting and storing data is necessary and cloud computing make it real. Crowd sourcing: Another major change is collecting human power with internet; Crowd sourcing. We can find many activities with gathering partial time of each person. Now, with internet, we can find right staff all over the world with reasonable cost and time. Internet of Things / Cyber-Physical System: As the internet is enhancing, we see communication not only between people but also between machines and sensors. Internet of Thing and Cyber-Physical System, which is common expression in US, is one of [19]

20 III. OPPORTUNITIES & VISION FOR A COMMON CLOUD MARKET the key technologies in future. Having IoT and CPS, we will get more and more data from the world and handling human life and economics with the data gathered. Recognition / Artificial Intelligence: Real time analysis is also a future trend and the technologies of recognition and artificial intelligence becomes more important. Understanding video streaming which people see is an example. Glass type camera and monitor provides more information to you according to capturing video streaming from the camera. Voice recognition also becomes common and many service can be controlled by voice soon. It becomes realised with cloud computing as well as big data analysis and crowd sourcing. High Performance Computing: highly performant execution of even complex distributed applications with a high data requirement, such as big data, engineering simulations etc. [20] [1]

21 IV. ANALYSIS & GAPS BEFORE GOING INTO A DETAILED ANALYSIS of the necessary requirements and the current open gaps that need to be addressed in future R&D work, it is worth quickly summarising some of the main points that can be noted from the use cases and the opportunities discussed above: First and foremost it will be noted that the use cases cover all three typical cloud types IaaS, SaaS and PaaS are required for realising the integration of Japan and the EU on a future internet level. Specifically PaaS: is needed to easily create new services, offer web sites, create easy product offerings etc. SaaS: specialised services, such as for egovernment and ehealth. IaaS: make data and services available across frontiers, take data with you etc. This is not really surprising, as the three types reflect the global interest and usage of clouds. Nonetheless, it will be noted that certain functionalities, such as on network level will have to be addressed first, before more complex platforms and services can be realised. As also discussed above, we need to take legislative and policy concerns into consideration when approaching any solution, respectively need to find technical mechanisms to cope with the implications from addressing such concerns (such as not shipping data out of the country, anonymising and encrypting it first etc.). It must thereby be stressed that as opposed to the regions individually, no common governing body exists that would be able to mediate between the individual legislative conditions instead exchange and discussion must take place on political level in parallel to the technical research & development, but should not affect the latter. [21]

22 IV. ANALYSIS & GAPS In light of the opportunities identified above, we have to distinguish two types of challenges: the one related to enabling a joint or common cloud infrastructure and the ones related to improving cloud capabilities as such, which in most cases is an implicit pre-cursor to realising the capabilities for a joint cloud environment in the first instance: [A] SHARED CHALLENGES FOR REGIONAL AND TRANSREGIONAL CLOUDS Many fundamental challenges with respect to large scope cloud provisioning are as yet unsolved and already prove to be considerably challenging within a single, and comparatively closely located region, such as within Japan or the European Union. As elaborated in [SCH12], these issues are of a general IT concern and thus equally apply to both regions. What is more, since both regions struggle with similar problems in order to remain competitive with offerings from the United States, there is a common interest in mutually approaching these problems to gain a competitive advantage. By exchanging expertise and through joint elaboration, the problems can be solved way faster and with longer sustainability and larger impact, simply because the problems are highly diverse in the first instance and benefit from heterogeneity in their approach, i.e. by ensuring that a wide scope of problems and requirements are addressed. 1. AVAILABILITY, LATENCY & BANDWIDTH A primary concern throughout the whole future internet consists in the ratio between data usage and communication capacities, in particular latency and bandwidth. There are physical barriers that make the problem specifically hard and have specific impact on the availability of services / data in particular over long distances such as between Europe and Japan. To overcome these requires completely different approaches, taking partial data availability, result and code reuse etc. into consideration. [22]

23 IV. ANALYSIS & GAPS In terms of data access in cloud, it would be nice to have data and service that users want to use with closer location. That s the reason cloud services should be migrated to the data centre near the place users are in. 2. SOFTWARE ENGINEERING Along similar lines, all current programming models base on the assumptions that data access is for free, that data and code is not shared, that services are not distributed etc. Even modern extensions in Java, C# etc. basically just try to compensate the deficiencies of the underlying model(s) by adding capabilities on top which however do not really match the conditions, thus necessitating ever more and complex middleware. The traditional von Neumann model simply does not hold true for modern conditions anymore and need to be revised, whilst still maintaining the degree of performance and support for legacy software. By nature, this issue is closely co-related to hardware development (e.g. IoT) which is one of Japan s specific expertise areas, whereas Europe has a specific strength in algorithms and distributed programmability. 3. DISTRIBUTION, SHARING, CONSISTENCY, RELIABILITY Modern applications are however not only partitioned and distributed, but also share resources (code, software and in particular data), adapt and move dynamically etc. In other words, the requirements towards the execution behaviour and the data main tenance are too dynamic to be considered straight from the design process. Instead, similar to the networking constraints, mechanisms to deal with partially inconsistent data, with potential service failures etc. are increasingly required. These methods must keep the cost and energy factor low, though, and should not simply assume full replication etc. The problem increases obviously with distance between the endpoints and an integration of such different regions as Japan and Europe thus necessitates more advanced solutions than just staying within one region does. 4. HETEROGENEITY, PERFORMANCE, ENERGY Though devices are getting smaller and microcontrollers not really more performant [23]

24 IV. ANALYSIS & GAPS (cf. [NRC11]), the need for responsive and powerful applications (such as e.g. for big data processing) increases at an undiminished rate. The exploitation of remote servers to take over part of the load (cf. thin clients ) is a major step towards realising the future internet and integrating any device type, but faces many challenges, such as the programming and execution constraints described above. Along these lines, performance in light of the current hardware developments needs to be improved only a stronger co-design of hardware and not of software, but of programming models / software engineering principles can ensure that future devices meet future requirements. Future resources need to be easily exploited and similar performance needs to be achieved between completely different overall setups. This is in its extreme a merge between High Performance Computing (with European s strength residing in particular on usage and programming thereof) and Embedded Systems (a particular strength of Japan). [B] CHALLENGES TOWARDS A COMMON CLOUD Next to these fundamental challenges, we can identify the challenges that specifically arise with respect to an integration of the two regions in a unified cloud infrastructure. These challenges thus contribute directly to the realisation of the use cases identified in section III, but partially rely on advances made in the areas described under section IV.A: 1. ACCESSIBILITY AND INTEROPERABILITY One of the most obvious technical concerns relates to the interoperability between the two regions on all levels. Network and roaming have already advanced sufficiently to ensure low-level interoperability, so that the main problems arise on middleware, data and in particular service level. Whilst within a region some exchange between service developers and some pressure due to highly popular services will force a certain degree of interoperability, this factor is way less prominent between regions. If future services and offerings should be able to access data across, should shift images [24]

25 IV. ANALYSIS & GAPS across frontiers, or at least allow local replication for faster access, the degree of interoperability needs to be increased on all levels. Standards are not the general response to this, as they constrain the service scope, apply only to specific concerns, are slow to develop and, as history shows, diversify too quickly so that interoperability is hemmed again. To achieve sustainability and in particular to support freedom of development, more sophisticated approaches are needed that are able to either deal with multiple standards and their combination, or that allow for dynamic adaptation. 2. PERSONALISATION Form factors already play a major role when providing a service to the user: different devices means that the same information needs to be displayed in different fashion. This not only affects layout, but typically the whole code behind it Microsoft s Universal Apps are one current approach to this struggle with only one very constrained subset of the whole problem scope. In particular between cultures, not only the form factors differ, but the complete cultural approach towards consuming and interpreting information including language, reading direction, iconography etc. Making a service or host attractive and usable involves more than just crossing the language barrier. The whole domain of personalisation tackles this problem on a lower scope: what kind of information is relevant for which user. But already aspects such as in what way does the user process the information are starting to be addressed. If providers (prosumers, hosts etc.) are enabled to cross this cultural barrier easily, they also considerably improve their capabilities to offer attractive and useful, and therefore competitive services. 3. AVAILABILITY A major recurring concern consists obviously in the availability of data and services over larger distances, given the physical constraints by the network. Distances such as between Japan and Europe make smooth and immediate availability of either [25]

26 IV. ANALYSIS & GAPS services or data over the network impossible the latency alone generates bigger delays than acceptable for any form of interactive usage. The only way to circumvent this problem consists in making the respective resource (code, data) available closer or directly in the respective other region. This has multiple implications (leaving policy and legislative issues aside for now) The respective other region must be ready to host the according resource and ensure its accessibility. Along these lines, a commonly agreed payment / accounting and sign in model is a base necessity Shared resource between regions implies that it must be available in both regions, thus shifting the availability problem to a consistency problem The resource must principally be ready in the region before the user tries to access it All this necessitates that we have a different view on how applications are written, executed and how resources are used at runtime. Again, the capability to deal with such large distances as between Japan and EU implies major advances in terms of availability and perceived quality and performance within a region. 4. POLICY AND LEGISLATIVE CONCERNS As noted above, research and development cannot address policy and legislative concerns that arise from the two politically disjunctive regions. Instead, we must constrain the work to problem domains that either are not affected by such concerns or where technical solutions can circumvent them, e.g. by ensuring locality, encrypting or anonymising the data etc. This means foremost that the according problem points need to be identified, and that the degree of freedom in this respect needs to be clearly specified. This includes not only legal concerns, but also interest and concerns by the typical user groups, as this directly impacts on uptake and impact of the solutions. [26]

27 IV. ANALYSIS & GAPS Such constraints and concerns must generally be technically specified and realisable, i.e. the federated environment between Japan and EU must be able to understand the specification of the constraints and enact these constraints, such as retaining data / services in specific locations. The immediately notable constraints are: locality, data protection (encryption, anonymisation), access constraints (authentication, security).. [27] [1]

28 V. AN R&D ROADMAP TO A COMMON CLOUD MARKET ON BASIS OF THE DISCUSSION ABOVE, we can identify the key technical challenges that should be addressed in a common R&D framework / collaboration initiative. Within this section we try to sketch out a rough roadmap for these individual challenges and their respective complexity, i.e. in which order and to which intensity they should be addressed. This roadmap tries to take developments on the market into consideration to a certain degree, but should generally be considered indicative with respect to the timeline, as the concrete development cannot be correctly predicted in advance. STEP 1: ESTABLISHING THE BASE CAPABILITIES & REQUIREMENTS FOR TRANSREGIONAL CLOUDS The first technical concerns to be addressed consists in realising the base capabilities for a joint infrastructure across Japan and the EU in the first instance. This involves in particular: #1 Interoperability and portability: regional infrastructures / services / platforms need to be able to talk to each other. Ideally services can be hosted & executed across, i.e. in both regions, without having to be recompiled. This may not in all cases be sensible, e.g. in specialised PaaS where not possible, alternatives need to be investigated #2 Federation: implies that the services / images cannot only interact, but that they can also be configured across, allowing for remote control, full integration into distributed workflows etc. [28]

29 V. AN R&D ROADMAP TO A COMMON CLOUD MARKET #3 Locality: the ability to identify the current location of a service / data and assess / adhere to location constraints is vital for meeting data protection and legislation issues across regions. The degree of granularity may vary, depending on use case and region At the same time to these concrete technical concerns, some research effort should be invested into aspects that require longer development periods and effort, or that require more base knowledge, respectively steer usage in the future: #4 Legislative constraints & general concerns: to steer the locality con straints, and to identify the concrete technical requirements to be addressed for the execution behaviour (see below), the definite legislative and end-user concerns need to be gathered and formalised #5 Cost metrics & infrastructure models: for ensuring availability and compensating the communication speed, better metrics for impact assessment need to be developed that reflect modern cloud usage and the underlying network behaviour #6 Localisation basics: cultural differences in language, but in particular in interpreting human interfaces have to be studied carefully much work has already been performed in this area from an anthropological, cultural and linguistic perspective. The according information needs to be formalised and generalised in a way that it can be applied to human-user interfaces and the models thereof. STEP 2: FIRST TRANSREGIONAL FEDERATED INFRASTRUCTURES In a second phase, the actual infrastructure needs to be built up and be made available, according to the capabilities and constraints realised in the first phase. This means in particular that services and data are able to move across the federated infrastructure, without necessarily fulfilling all the non-functional properties, through: [29]

30 V. AN R&D ROADMAP TO A COMMON CLOUD MARKET #7 Federated and adaptive hosting & execution: enable the execution and distribution of services and data across trans-regional federations, following simple first metrics (cf. #5). Consider in particular aspects of availability and locality constraints #8 Adaptive user interfaces, form factors etc.: enable adaptive user interfaces and interaction modes that not only adapt to form factors, but also regional (and principally personal) usage differences #9 Network as a cloud: to optimize not only computing resource but also network toward cloud availability and scalability. Latency control between clouds #10 Scalability and de-scalability with interoperability: to optimize computing resources as well as network resources In addition to the concrete technological development and advances, further topics need to be initiated at this point, building up on the advanced capabilities and in particular preparing the next phases these include: #11 #Consistency: with the increased distance and the higher costs / problems for maintaining availability, consistency is affected strongly for any shared data (resources / services). At this point in time, the concrete scalability behaviour will still have to be defined manually, but new consistency mechanisms must be investigated that respect the impact defined by the cost metrics (#5). #12 Personalisation: and in particular observation / data mining will have to be exploited to predict user behaviour, move data in advance, take according precautions to maintain availability etc. For example google already analysis travel plans for taking such precautions on an individual level. #13 Composition & decomposition: in order to fully cater for availability vs. consistency in such a distributed environment, applications will have to be treated as a set of tasks, rather than full-blown single instances, so that tasks can be moved and replicated individually. [30]

31 V. AN R&D ROADMAP TO A COMMON CLOUD MARKET #14 Programmability: will be a major concern at this point, due to the complexity of the applications and the impact of the infrastructure. Model driven description languages may at this point aid the development of new software engineering mechanisms. STEP 3: FULL USABILITY OF TRANSREGIONAL CLOUDS At this point in time, basically the full federation is in place and can be used by according applications / users / hosts. In order to realise the full usage potential, however, programmability, automation and adaptability need to advance considerably, so as to enable easy development and porting of applications for this environment: #15 Supported adaptation and decomposition: applications in environments of the scope and distribution envisaged cannot be manually controlled anymore their execution and adaptation needs to become as automated as possible, which means locality according to constraints and availability requirements, automated consistency, replication and distribution, as well as separation according to usage etc. #16 Programmability: will have to become easy and intuitive at this point, incorporating aspects of adaptability, localisation, personalisation etc. Finally, at this point expertise and training needs to be build up to #17 actively support migration to the cloud. [31]

32 VI. RECOMMENDATIONS THE FOLLOWING ARE SOME GENERAL RECOMMENDATIONS that we consider important for realising the above roadmap: R1 The primary work should focus not only on interoperability but in particular on the availability challenges that arise from the distance between data host and data processor. R2 A second pillar is a software engineering model that can differentiate the user interface, processing and data and from this generate a distributed data-/work-flow that allows for sharing, moving and segmenting data. R3 Further work consists in building up an interoperable platform that allows easy definition of services that adapt to culture and can be hosted across. It should cater for different means to move data and / or service instances.

33 REFERENCES [SCH12] Schubert, L., Jeffery, K. & Neidecker-Lutz, B. (eds.) (2012). A Roadmap for Advanced Cloud Technologies under H2020 Recommendations by the Cloud Expert Group. Cordis (Online), BE: European Commission. Available at: [COL12] Columbus, L. (2012). Cloud Computing and Enterprise Software Forecast Update, Forbes (online). Available at: /11/08/cloud-computing-and-enterprise-softwareforecast-update-2012/ [HAU12] Hauser, S. (2012). Cloud Computing to Create 14M New Jobs by The Outlook Series (online). Available at: Susan_Hauser_Microsoft_Cloud_Computing_Create_14M_ New_Jobs_2015_Susan_Hauser_Microsoft.htm [CLI14] Clifford, C. (2014). The Hottest Ecommerce Businesses to Start in The Enterpreneur (online). Available at [NRC11] National Research Council (2011). The Future of Computing Performance: Game Over or Next Level?. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. [33]

34 REFERENCES [PWC14] Price Waterhouse Coopers (2014). Global Software Leaders Increase 'Software-as-a-Service' Revenues 60% in One Year. PWC Press (online). Available at: [GAR12] Gartner (2012). Forecast Analysis: Enterprise Infrastructure Software, Worldwide, , 3Q12 [IDC12] IDC (2012). Worldwide Enterprise Server Cloud Computing Forecast. [VIS14] VisionGain Telecoms Report (2014). Internet of Things (IoT) Market Wireless Machine to Machine (M2M) Connectivity, Enterprise & Consumer Connected Devices & Objects Ecosystem. VisionGain. Available at: [NGG3] Future for European Grids: Grids and Service-Oriented Knowl edge Utilities: Vision and research directions 2010 and beyond. Available at: ftp://ftp.cordis.europa.eu/pub/ist/docs/grids/ngg3report_en.pdf [EC12] European Commission (2012). Frequently Asked Questions: Erasmus Programme. MEMO/12/54, 30/01/2012. Available at: erasmus0910_en.pdf [IOM12] International Organization for Migration (2012). Japan. Available at: [34]

35 REFERENCES [UNCTAD14] United Nations Conference on Trade and Development (2014). World services exports 7% up in quarter 1 of Available at OriginalVersionID=806&Sitemap_x0020_Taxonomy= Statistics;#20;#UNCTADHome [STWR08] Share the World s Resources (2008). Multinational corporations: an overview. Available at: multinational-corporations-overview THE PRESENT REPORT CAN BE DOWNLOADED AT: THE MAIN PAGE FOR ALL OF THE BROCHURES: [35]

36 A SUCRE PROJECT PUBLICATION / 2014 [email protected] HELLENIC REPUBLIC National and Kapodistrian University of Athens