Cloud Computing and the Internet

Vint Cerf's article on Cloud Computing and the Internet. Near the end, he poses many unanswered questions to be resolved such as

• Cloud computing reference model
• Capabilities of inter-cloud communication
• Authentication and Pervasive Identity between Clouds
• How is data preseved between clouds
  

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Vint Cerf:

The Internet is largely a software artifact and a layered one as my distinguished colleague, Sir Tim Berners-Lee has observed on many occasions. The layering has permitted a remarkable versatility in the implementation of the Internet and its applications. New technology can be used to implement each layer and as long as the interfaces between the layers remain static, the changes do not affect the functionality of the system. In this way, the Internet has evolved and adapted new transmission and switching technology into its lower layers and has supported new upper layers such as the HTTP, HTML and SSL protocols of the World Wide Web.

In recent years, the term “cloud computing” has emerged to make reference to the idea that from the standpoint of a device, say a laptop, on the Internet, many of the applications appear to be operating somewhere in the network “cloud.” Google, Amazon, Microsoft and others, as well as enterprise operators, are constructing these cloud computing centers. Generally, each cloud knows only about itself and is unaware of the existence of other cloud computing facilities. In some ways, cloud computing is like the networks of the 1960s when my colleagues and I began to think about connecting computers together on networks. Each network was typically proprietary. IBM had Systems Network Architecture; Digital Equipment Corporation had its DECNET; Hewlett-Packard had its Distributed System. These networks were specific to each manufacturer and did not interconnect nor even have a way to express the idea of connecting to another network. The Internet was the solution that Robert Kahn and I developed to allow all such networks to be interconnected in a uniform way.
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Entire post at Google Research Blog