1. Cherchez La Federation
or
How d we motivate federation?
H do i f d i ?
Paul Mockapetris (Paul-Vincent.Mockapetris@npa.lip6.fr, pvm@Nominum.com)
Serge Fdida (serge fdida@lip6 fr)
(serge.fdida@lip6.fr)
Panayotis Antoniadis (Panayotis.Antoniadis@lip6.fr)

2. A simple definition for Federation
 Federation
occurs when two or more
organizations agree to each allocate
some of their resources to implement a
common service.
Org Org
A B
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3. Federation Examples
I t
Internet
t
– Share connectivity and multiple levels of protocol
 BGP
– Share routing information
 DNS
– Distribute configuration
g
 Carter phone Decision
– Create interface for communication devices
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4. Qui Bono?
 Th
The reasons f federation revolve
for f d ti l
around mutual benefit, but in practice are
quite different f different t
it diff t for diff t types of
f
organizations.
 Corollary:a particular federation or
federation technology can be attractive or
unattractive to different organizations
organizations.
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5. Governments
G l
Goals:
– Maximize overall economy
– Maximize overall user satisfaction
– Minimize risk
 Methods:
– Regulate monopolies; encourage competitiveness;
smaller and more numerous markets
– Encourage best of breed solution finding
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6. Enterprises
G l
Goals
– Persistent competitive advantage
– Leverage strategic advantages to new
markets
– Reduce risk
 Methods
– Own monopolies or near monopolies
– Commodity i
C di inputs; proprietary outputs
i
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7. Users
G l
Goals
– Best technology
– Best Price
– Ease of use / Least investment in learning
g
 Methods
– Purchasing h i
P h i choices
– Influence on Government
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8. Researchers
G l
Goals
– Innovation
– Freedom to explore alternatives
 Methods
– Joint efforts to aggregate scarce resources
– Embrace di
E b disruptive risk
ti i k
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9. Federating Clouds
(Researchers)
M k
Makes eminent sense for researchers
i t f h
– Scale of all academic resources less than
that of production systems by orders of
magnitude
• E.g. PlanetLab, OneLab
• Use individual’s phones as distributed sensor net,
or intermittently connected testbed
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10. Federating Clouds
(Enterprise Providers)
 Littl
Little advantage t d f Cl d providers
d t today for Cloud id
– Makes their output a commodity
– Scale isn’t an issue
– Coverage isn’t an issue (y )
g (yet?)
 Perhaps federate lower levels?
– (federate
(f d t commodities, not discriminators)
diti t di i i t )
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11. Federating Clouds
(Enterprise users)
C
Can we use f d ti t reduce risk?
federation to d i k?
– Avoid cloud lock in
– Handle demand surge
 Connect different cloud apps
– Inevitable once separate cloud-based apps
get important enough?
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12. Federating Clouds
(Governments)
G
Governments
t as big enterprises
bi t i
– Lots of resources to share & save
– Lots of data to make available, internally and
externally
– Load moves around (e.g. IRS in April?)
 Governments as regulators
– Policy?
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13. Conclusions
L t
Lots of forces work against federation
ff k i t f d ti
 Will happen first in
pp
– Research world
– Governments
 We want to make consolidation happen
sooner b t th ’ a growing b
but there’s i base of f
legacy inertia.
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14. Questions
H
How t shape academic efforts so that
to h d i ff t th t
they will be relevant to the other worlds?
– E.g. Agenda and participation in NSF
workshop
 Isit the same as networks before the
Internet?
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15. Today vs.1983?
y
(ARPAnet extinction; start of the Internet age)
 Si il iti
Similarities
– Lots of production proprietary inertia
 Differences
– Ease of experimentation with multiple open
standard OSes, etc.
– Cheap hardware
– End of the hourglass model
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16. End of the hourglass?
 IP is th center of the Network just as the earth
i the t f th N t kj t th th
is the center of the universe.
 It’s
’still the most important f
frame of reference,
f f
but not the only one.
 E.g.
– Ethernet may be the way to port servers in
datacenters
– Custom content based networks need not be IP
based.
based
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17. The Gravitational model
W
We have large adoption (
h l d ti (mass) of certain
) f t i
standard protocols, uses and interfaces.
– IP,
IP users, movies, web, games, …
i b
 There’s a huge attraction to finding a better
path b t
th between any t two of these (so long as you
f th ( l
don’t fall into another gravitational well)
 This
leads to multiple paths between the
biggest masses, or a polymorphic net.
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