Private Cloud Initiative

University of Calgary Private Cloud Initiative
The intent of this page and related pages is to document the progress of faculty, researchers, students, and staff in creating a local private cloud computing environment. This private cloud will serve as a major research instrument for researchers across multiple Faculties.

There is a strong case for a private Canadian cloud computing infrastructure. Researchers at the U of C are interested in studying the systems behavior and security properties of a real cloud environment; doing so entails fine-grained instrumentation of multiple layers of the cloud (more than most cloud clients have access to, such as the underlying virtualization layer and hardware resources).


 * Meeting Minutes (meeting minutes starting 18 Jan 2011)
 * Intended Uses (possible clients of the private cloud)
 * Research Initiatives (list of studies and experiments)
 * IRB/CPHS approval discussion
 * Resource Requirements (personnel/management, hardware, software, funding)
 * Data Repositories

Tasks

 * Define experimental goals (at least within CPSC & ISPIA and possibly Faculty of Medicine/Public Health)
 * Define service goals and roles (what value can we add to research projects around the university?)
 * Identify a hardware platform (e.g., IBM)
 * Identify a virtualization management layer (IaaS), e.g., VMWare, Microsoft
 * Identify a guest OS layer (or appropriate mixture)
 * Identify an appropriate set of SaaS components (e.g., Hadoop)
 * Coordinate with UCIT and IS2
 * Start conversations with vendors; sales pitch is to partner with a university to understand the parameters of a private Canadian cloud (e.g., VMWare Academic partner)
 * At appropriate time, bring in local cloud services company to the conversation

Experiments
Links to various experiments. Some of this is not yet ready for public consumption.

Virtual Machine Fingerprinting

Links

 * Existing Cloud Research Initiatives
 * http://www.tclouds-project.eu/
 * http://appsense.com/solutions/cloudcomputing.aspx
 * https://opencirrus.org/content/services
 * Microsoft
 * http://www.microsoft.com/virtualization/en/us/private-cloud-get-started.aspx
 * IBM
 * http://www.ibm.com/ibm/cloud/developers/
 * http://www.ibm.com/search/csass/search?sn=mh&q=private%20cloud&lang=en&cc=us&en=utf
 * http://www-01.ibm.com/software/tivoli/products/cloudburst/
 * http://www-03.ibm.com/systems/x/solutions/infrastructure/cloud/specs.html
 * VMWare
 * http://www.vmware.com/products/vcloud/
 * http://www.vmware.com/solutions/cloud-computing/private-cloud/
 * http://www.vmware.com/solutions/cloud-computing/private-cloud/vmware-cloud.html
 * http://www.vmware.com/products/vsphere/
 * http://www.vmware.com/products/vcloud-director/
 * 
 * http://www.vmware.com/solutions/cloud-computing/benefit-cloud-computing/security.html
 * http://www.vmware.com/products/vshield/
 * Cloud Services
 * http://hadoop.apache.org/
 * http://aws.amazon.com/ec2/faqs/
 * http://code.google.com/appengine/docs/whatisgoogleappengine.html
 * Cloud Security
 * Cloud Security Alliance (CSA) - http://www.cloudsecurityalliance.org/
 * Cloud Computing Risk Assessment by ENISA (European Network and Information Security Agency) - http://www.enisa.europa.eu/act/rm/files/deliverables/cloud-computing-risk-assessment
 * Cloud Computing Security from an Enterprise perspective - http://cloudsecurity.org/
 * Related Work
 * http://www.cs.jhu.edu/~ragib/sp11/cs412/

People
List of people involved in the project and their roles and contributions.

Rei, Michael, Kris, Gaven, Raul, ...

Links
http://money.cnn.com/galleries/2011/retirement/1105/gallery.retirementguide_stocks_cloud_computing.fortune/?iid=EL

http://gigaom.com/2011/07/12/cloudflare-funding/?utm_source=social&utm_medium=twitter&utm_campaign=gigaom

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2011/07/01/nhs_zscaler/

http://www.computerworld.com/s/article/9216036/Amazon_cloud_glitch_knocks_out_popular_websites

http://searchcloudsecurity.techtarget.com/news/2240035258/Cloud-provider-security-study-reveals-security-gaps

http://www.itworld.com/cloud-computing/158517/amazon-crash-reveals-cloud-computing-actually-based-data-centers

http://www.wired.com/wiredenterprise/2012/02/azure_outage

http://us.cnn.com/2012/08/06/tech/mobile/icloud-security-hack/index.html?hpt=hp_t3

http://us.cnn.com/2012/08/09/tech/web/cloud-security-tips/index.html?hpt=hp_bn5

Sponsors
Funding for this instrument comes from...

Contact
The cloud-security-interest-L mailing list at the U of C serves as a forum for discussing this research instrument (use cases, troubleshooting, feature requests, research ideas, hosting requests). Please visit the Mailman page for the list to sign up or browse the archives:

http://mailman.ucalgary.ca/mailman/listinfo/cloud-security-interest-l