Following the announcement of the European Commission’s plans for the Data Protection Directive, Kroes said at the World Economic Forum in Davos that the time is right to look to the cloud to help Europe get to grips with its copyright and piracy problems. She also announced a European Cloud Partnership with €10 million initial funding.Over the past year the commission has held talks with cloud providers, users and consumers to identify the main issues that need to be addressed…
How to document cloud design decisions
When developing and integrating cloud systems, the public interfaces and external "contracts" among services mean that design and architecture can evolve rapidly and in parallel. But when they do and the teams are not in the same room, this speed is an invitation to chaos. As two teams work on opposite sides of an interface (the service provider and the service consumer), it’s easy for the teams’ definition of variables and methods to fall out of sync. Of course the service provider team could update its document and notify the other team about a new semantic of a field value or behavior of a service. But the reality is too often that they don’t, and the classic problem of distributed version control rears its ugly head.
Let’s start with some assumptions about cloud design and architecture:
1. The teams value speed and smarts over rigor and process.
2. The teams use an Agile process that stresses iterative development, with continuous integration and testing cycles…