In 2012 it had been clear for a long time that the future for IT was the Cloud. Service providers had already started the race to build the next wave of infrastructure, platforms and services. Decision makers in large, more risk averse IT purchasing organisations had seen the early providers and adopters and began to ask, when and how do we jump? At HP Research we were challenged with providing thought leadership on this to our key customers. The decisions around it were complex and fundamental to the future of their businesses. If they got it wrong by moving too early or late, too quickly or slowly, or to the wrong providers the impact could be debilitating, conversely the rewards for service providers could be significant.
We developed the concept of a migration simulation and a paradigm called Cloud Stewardship Economics. Underpinning this was a notion of information stewardship encompassing concepts such as values, ethics, resilience, and sustainability. All inherited from approaches to the management of the natural resources around us. Our research team built a rigorous mathematical model of a cloud service provider/customer ecosystem and we delivered it via a guided workshop centred around a Futuristic User Interface (FUI). My role was to design and deliver the technical aspects of the simulation. Working with a local contract UI developer we built the concept of a shared visualisation centred around a sphere which would reflect the global context of the problem domain. This was coupled with ‘private’ interactive tablets that enabled the workshop participants to test and receive feedback on the results of their decisions. The simulation was based over an accelerated 5 year period with participants running and reviewing multiple simulations during the workshop.
Cloud Stewardship Economics Simulation – an accelerated time simulation.
The visualisation was designed to require an accompanying narrative for consumption. Broadly it visualises a number of cloud providers as they migrate from In-House IT, now typically referred to as On-Premise, which is clustered at the bottom of the sphere towards Public Cloud offerings clustered at the top. At parts of the simulation economic, regulatory and technical ‘shocks’ can be simulated.
The system was developed using NodeJS to manage the simulation/model state and WebGL to provide a rich, high performance 3D user interface natively on a range of platforms. WebGL in particular was a risk area being only recently only a year past its first release in 2011.
Read more about the research and models underpinning the simulation in the paper accompanying this work: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/221276692_Information_Stewardship_in_Cloud_Ecosystems_Towards_Models_Economics_and_Delivery