Clarifying the Cloud

In vacation weeks and those that follow, the group working on the Data in the Cloud do not usually meet. But we are always working on something....

A couple things of interest for this project include (1) what other services at ICPSR we have put in the cloud and (2) what resources Steve Burling (our 70% man ....we call him that because 70% of his time is dedicated to the project....it isn't meant to imply that he is only 70% of a man ...I think) are using to build the applications and images for this project.

First, a link to Bryan's ICPSR Tech blog about the other ICPSR services running in the cloud. On-going experiences with these service will be useful in monitoring service performance primarily. Bryan will keep us informed about problems or triumphs so we can evaluate other sources of information that will inform what we do. Synergy is fantastic, don't you think?

Second, Steve reports that these are the specific resources he has been using to build our ACI (remember this is our fancy acronym for the customized analytic space we are creating for users) in the cloud. The primary source is Amazon's documentation on the AWS service. In particular from there, he has used the Getting Started Guide, the Developer Guide, and the Command Line Reference.

Things we are thinking about

In the most recent meeting of the "Cloud" team, 2 issues came up that need further research and set us into some of the gray areas of cloud computing. The first is software licensing in the cloud. Our goal is to provision the analytic instances with the software of choice (within reason) for analysts. The question is whether ICPSR's licenses apply to "virtual space" if we are in fact renting that space from Amazon. We are pursuing it. The second question that requires some experiment is whether those people who want to access the "Cloud" will come in via Windows Remote Desktop or our Citrix server. The tradeoff is security vs ease of use. Remote Desktop is embedded in Windows software whereas users would need to get access to the Citrix system with some software. We are going to test this as we move forward. These two issues will be documented by the team once we have a clearer notion of how this will work.

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?

Putting Confidential Data in the Clouds

This blog is designed to chronicle progress on a new project at the Inter-University Consortium for Political and Social Research funded by the National Institutes of Health, Office of the Director through the Challenge Grant Program. The primary goal of the grant is to test whether confidential data, that is data distributed under license or contract, can be effectively and safely disseminated via the computing cloud. Currently data licenses and contracts put the burden of securing data files on the user. This often involves elaborate data security plans that may involve purchasing new technology or securing existing networks and machinery. This grant is to test whether we can dynamically configure temporary computing environments in the Cloud that will provider users with a secure environment in which to analyze confidential data. We will be building both the application that provisions this analytic instance and the web interface to help users navigate it. The experimental part of this project is to test cloud security and analyst's reaction to more distant analytic environments where they have less control. We have partners in this endeavor to help us recruit users to test the applications we build. They are at the Panel Study of Income Dynamics and the Los Angeles Family and Neighborhood Survey.

This is the first day of the project!