Clouds for Enterprises (C4E) 2012

Call for Papers: The 2nd International Workshop on

Clouds for Enterprises (C4E) 2012

http://nicta.com.au/people/tosicv/c4e2012/

held at the 16h IEEE International EDOC Conference (EDOC 2012) "The Enterprise Computing Conference"

(http://www.edocconference.org), Beijing, China, 10-14 September 2012

Important dates:

Paper submission: Sunday, 1 April 2012

Notification of acceptance: Monday, 28 May 2012

Camera-ready version: Friday, 15 June 2012

Description:

Cloud computing is an increasingly popular computing paradigm that aims to streamline the on-demand provisioning of software (SaaS), platform (PaaS), infrastructure (IaaS), and data (DaaS) as services. Deploying applications on a cloud can help to achieve scalability, improve flexibility of computing infrastructure, and reduce total cost of ownership. However, a variety of challenges arise when deploying and operating applications and services in complex and dynamic cloud-based environments, which are frequent in enterprises and governments.

Due to the security and privacy concerns with public cloud offerings (which first attracted widespread attention), it seems likely that many enterprises and governments will choose hybrid cloud, community cloud, and (particularly in the near future) private cloud solutions. Multi-tier infrastructures like these not only promise vast opportunities for future business models and new types of integrated business services, but also pose severe technical and organizational problems.

The goal of this one-day workshop is to bring together academic, industrial, and government researchers (from different disciplines), developers, and IT managers interested in cloud computing technologies and/or their consumer-side/provider-side use in enterprises and governments. Through paper presentations and discussions, this workshop will contribute to the inter-disciplinary and multi-perspective exchange of knowledge and ideas, dissemination of results about completed and on-going research projects, as well as identification and analysis of open cloud research and adoption/exploitation issues.

This is the second Clouds for Enterprises (C4E) workshop - the first was held in 2011 at the 13th IEEE Conference on Commerce and Enterprise Computing (CEC'11) on Monday, 5 September 2011 in Luxembourg, Luxembourg. The C4E 2011 workshop program, posted on the workshop Web page http://nicta.com.au/people/tosicv/clouds4enterprises2011/, included the keynote "Blueprinting the Cloud" by Prof. Willem-Jan van den Heuvel, presentations of 3 full and 5 short peer-reviewed workshop papers, and the discussion session "Migrating Enterprise/Government Applications to Clouds: Experiences and Challenges". The workshop proceedings were published by the IEEE and included in the IEEEXplore digital library, together with the proceedings of the main CEC'11 conference and the other co-located workshops. The Clouds for Enterprises (C4E) 2012 workshop will be held at another prestigious IEEE conference - the 16h IEEE International EDOC Conference (EDOC 2012) "The Enterprise Computing Conference" in Beijing, China, 10-14 September 2012. The main theme of the IEEE EDOC 2012 conference is "When Services in Cloud Meet Enterprises", so the C4E 2012 workshop is an excellent fit into and addition to the IEEE EDOC 2012 conference.

This Clouds for Enterprises 2012 workshop invites contributions from both technical (e.g., architecture-related) and business perspectives (with governance issues spanning both perspectives). The topics of interest include, but are not limited to:

Technical Perspective:

- Patterns and best practices in development for cloud-based applications

- Deployment and configuration of cloud services

- Migration of legacy applications to clouds

- Hybrid and multi-tier cloud architectures

- Architectural support for enhancing cloud computing interoperability and portability

- Architectural principles and approaches to cloud computing

- Cloud architectures for adaptivity or robustness

- Evaluation methods for cloud architectures

- Architectural support for dynamic resource management to support computing needs of cloud services

- Cloud architectures of emerging applications, such as mashup of enterprise/government services

- Impact of cloud computing on architecture of software and, more generally, IT systems

Enterprise/Government Application Perspective:

- Case studies and experience reports in development of cloud-based systems in enterprises and governments

- Analyses of cloud initiatives of different governments

- Business aspects of cloud service markets

- Technical and business support for various cloud service market roles, such as brokers, integrators, and certification authorities

- New applications and business models for enterprises/governments leveraging cloud computing

- Economic evaluation of cloud-based enterprises

Governance Perspective:

- Service lifecycle models

- Architectural support for security and privacy

- Architectural support for trust in/by cloud services

- Capacity planning of services running in a cloud

- Architectural support for quality of service (QoS) and service level agreement (SLA) management

- Accountability of cloud services, including mechanisms, algorithms and methods for monitoring, analyzing and reporting service status and usage profiles

- IT Governance and compliance, particularly in hybrid and multi-tier clouds

Review and publication process:

Authors are invited to submit previously unpublished, high-quality papers before

***1 April 2012***.

Papers published or submitted elsewhere will be automatically rejected. All submissions should be made using the EasyChair Web site http://www.easychair.org/conferences/?conf=c4e2012.

Two types of submissions are solicited:ˇ

* Full papers - describing mature research or industrial case studies, up to 8 pages long

* Short papers - describing work in progress or position statements, up to 4 pages long

Papers presenting and analyzing completed projects are particularly welcome. Papers about on-going research projects are also welcome, especially if they contain critical, qualitative and quantitative analysis of already achieved results and remaining open research issues. In addition, papers about experiences and comparative analysis of using cloud computing in enterprises and governments are also welcome. Submissions from industry and government are particularly encouraged. In addition to presentation of peer-reviewed papers this one-day workshop will contain a keynote from an industry expert and an open discussion session on practical issues of using clouds in enterprise/government environments.

Paper submissions should be in the IEEE Computer Society Conference Proceedings paper format. Templates (with guidelines) for this format are availableˇat: http://www.computer.org/portal/web/cscps/formatting (see the blue box on the left-hand side). All submissions should include the author's name, affiliation and contact details. The preferred format is Adobe Portable Document Format (PDF), but Postscript (PS) and Microsoft Word (DOC) will be accepted in exceptional cases.

Inquiries about paper submission should be e-mailed to Dr. Vladimir Tosic (vladat at server: computer.org) and include "Clouds for Enterprises 2012 Inquiry" in the Subject line.

All submissions will be formally peer-reviewed by at least 3 Program Committee members. The authors will be notified of acceptance around

***28 May 2012***.

ˇˇ At least one author of every accepted paper MUST register for the IEEE EDOC 2012 conference and present the paper.

All accepted papers (both full and short) will be published by the IEEE and included in the IEEE Digital Library, together with the proceedings of the other IEEE EDOC 2012 workshops. A follow-up journal issue with improved and extended versions of the best workshop papers is also planned.

Workshop Chairs:

Dr. Vladimir Tosic, NICTA and University of New South Wales and University of Sydney, Australia; E-mail: vladat (at: computer.org) ? primary workshop contact

Dr. Andrew Farrell, University of Auckland, New Zealand; E-mail: ahfarrell (at: gmail.com)

Dr. Karl Michael Gîschka, Vienna University of Technology, Austria; E-mail: Karl.Goeschka (at: tuwien.ac.at)

Dr. Sebastian Hudert, TWT, Germany; E-mail: sebastian.hudert (at: twt-gmbh.de)

Prof. Dr. Hanan Lutfiyya, University of Western Ontario, Canada; E-mail: hanan (at: csd.uwo.ca)

Dr. Michael Parkin, Tilburg University, The Netherlands; E-mail: m.s.parkin (at: uvt.nl)

Workshop Program Committee:

The final list of he workshop Program Committee will be listed soon at the workshop Web site: http://nicta.com.au/people/tosicv/c4e2012.

HyperCard

A long time ago, and in what may seem to some as a galaxy far,far away, there was no web and no way of traversing resources via hyperlinks. In that time the PC was just taking off and most of us were lucky if we shared a computer with less than 5 people at a time! Back then I shared one of the original classic Macs and came across this wonderful piece of software that was to change the way I thought about the world. HyperCard was something I started to play with just because it was there and really for no other reason, but it quickly became apparent that its core approach of hypermedia was different and compelling. These days I can't recall all of the ways in which I used HyperCard, but I do remember that a few of them helped me in my roleplaying endeavours at the time (ok not exactly work related but sometimes you learn by doing, no matter what it is that you are doing!)

When the Web came along it seemed so obvious the way that it worked. Hyperlinks between resources, whether they're database records (cards) or servers, makes a lot of sense for certain types of application. But extending it to a world wide mesh of disparate resources was a brilliant leap. I'm sure that HyperCard influenced the Web as it influenced several generations of developers. But I'm surprised with myself that I'd forgotten about it over the years. In fact it wasn't until the other day, when I was passing a shop window that happened to have an old Mac in it running HyperCard, that I remembered. It's over 20 years since those days, but we're all living under its influence.

Is Java the platform of the future?

I've mentioned before, but I think we are living in a period of time where a bigger explosion of programming languages is occurring than at any time in the past four decades. Having lived through a number of the classic languages such as BASIC, Simula, Pascal, Lisp, Prolog, C, C++ and Java, I can understand why people are fascinated with developing new ones: whether it's compiled versus interpreted, procedural versus functional, languages optimised for web development or embedded devices, I don't believe we'll ever have a single language that's right for all developer requirements.

This Polyglot movement is a reality and it's unlikely to go away any time soon. Fast forward a few years we may see a lot less languages around than today, but they will have been influenced strongly by their predecessors. I do believe that we need to make a distinction between the languages and the platforms that they inevitably spawn. And in this regard I think we need to learn from history now and quickly: unlike in the past we really don't need to reimplement the entire stack in the next cool language. I keep saying that there are core services and capabilities that transcend middleware standards and implementations such as CORBA or Java Enterprise Edition. Well guess what? That also means they transcend the languages in which they were written originally.

This is something that we realised well in the CORBA days, even if there were problems with the architecture itself. The fact that IDL was language neutral obviously meant your application could be constructed from components written in Java, COBOL and C++ without you either having to know or really having to care. Java broke that mould to a degree, and although Web Services are language independent, there's been too much backlash over SOAP, WSDL and friends that we forget this aspect at times. Of course it's an inherent part of REST.

However, if you look at what some are doing with these relatively new languages, there is a push to implement the stack in them from scratch. Now whilst it may make perfect sense to reimplement some components or approaches to take best advantage of some language capabilities, e.g., nginx; I don't think it's the norm. I think the kind of approaches we're seeing with, say, TorqueBox or Immutant where services implemented in one language are exposed to another in a way that makes them appear as if they were implemented natively, makes far more sense. Let's not waste time rehashing things like transactions, messaging and security, but instead concentrate on how best to offer these capabilities to the new polyglot movement that makes them fit in as first class citizens.

And to do this successfully is much more than just a technical issue; it requires an understanding of what the language offers, what the communities expect and working with both to fit in seamlessly. Being a Java programmer trying to push Java services into, say, Ruby, with a Java programmers approaches and understanding, will not guarantee success. You have to understand your users and let them guide you as much as you guide them.

So I still believe that in the future Java will, should and must play an important part in Cloud, mobile, ubiquitous computing etc. It may not be obvious to developers in these languages that they're using Java, but then it doesn't need to be. As long as they have access to all of the services and capabilities they need, in a way that feels entirely natural to them, why should it matter if some of those bits are hosted on or by a Java application server, for instance? The answer is that it shouldn't. And done right it means that these developers benefit from the maturity and reliability of these systems, built up over many years of real world deployments. Far better than the alternative.

The future of Java

Just a couple of cross posts that are worth giving a wider distribution. First on whether this new polyglot movement is the death of Java, and second how the JCP process has been changing for the better over the years.