Wednesday, October 21, 2009

First meeting summary and a link

We had our first substantive meeting of the "Cloud" team on 10/13/09 to try to start the engine on this project. I will let the technical people describe how we are to approach the tech side but I think it is useful to summarize the naive aspects of this experiment in order to keep some of the narrative in non-tech speak.

The pieces that need to be constructed for this to work are (1) the web app that gathers data from the user about how they want their analytic instance to look ---i.e. what software, etc. and (2) the "image" ---that is the application that instructs the cloud how to behave. We will develop the UNIX/Windows side of the image independently.

We also need to gather data set and user information from the Restricted Contracting System to both set the security conditions for the data and to pre-populate some of the web forms.

The other issues we discussed were (1) dealing with licensing issues for software that will be used in the analytic instances and (2) how the cloud data will be backed up.

Bryan provided us with an interesting article on cloud security. The great thing about this project is it provides so many wonderful metaphors (which social science usually does not frankly). This article is entitled something like "Hey You, Get Off Of My Cloud" If you are old enough ---you will know that it is a Rolling Stones song from 1965. So, we now also have a theme song for the grant as well. Who can ask for more?

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