A few days ago, Nick Carr worked his usual magic in analyzing Bill Thompson's keen observation that every element of "the cloud" eventually boils down to a physical element in a physical location with real geopolitical and legal influences. This problem was first brought to my attention in a blog post by Leslie Poston noting that the Canadian government has refused to allow public IT projects to use US-based hosting environments for fear of security breaches authorized via the Patriot Act. Nick added another example with the following:
Right before the manuscript of The Big Switch was shipped off to the printer ("manuscript" and "shipped off" are being used metaphorically here), I made one last edit, adding a paragraph about France's decision to ban government ministers from using Blackberrys since the messages sent by the popular devices are routinely stored on servers sitting in data centers in the US and the UK. "The risks of interception are real," a French intelligence official explained at the time.I hadn't thought too much about the political consequences of the cloud since first reading Nick's book, but these stories triggered a vision that I just can't shake.
Let me explain. First, some setup...
One of the really cool visions that Bill Coleman used to talk about with respect to cloud computing was the concept of "follow the moon"; in other words, moving running applications globally over the course of an earth day to where processing power is cheapest--on the dark side of the planet. The idea was originally about operational costs in general, but these days Cassatt and others focus this vision around electricity costs.
The concept of "moving" servers around the world was greatly enhanced by the live motion technologies offered by all of the major virtualization infrastructure players (e.g. VMotion). With these technologies (as you all probably know by now), moving a server from one piece of hardware to another is as simple as clicking a button. Today, most of that convenience is limited to within a single network, but with upcoming SLAuto federation architectures and standards that inter-LAN motion will be greatly simplified over the coming years.
(It should be noted that "moving" software running on bare metal is possible, but it requires "rebooting" the server image on another physical box.)
The key piece of the puzzle is automation. Whether simple runbook-style automation (automating human-centric processes) or all-out SLAuto, automation allows for optimized decision making across hundreds, thousands or even tens of thousands of virtual machines. Today, most SLAuto is blissfully unaware of runtime cost factors, such as cost of electricity or cost of network bandwidth, but once the elementary SLAuto solutions are firmly established, this is naturally the next frontier to address.
But hold on...
As the articles I noted earlier suggest, early cloud computing users have discovered a hitch in the giddy-up: the borders and politics of the world DO matter when it comes to IT legislation.
If law will in fact have such an influence on cloud computing dynamics, it occurs to me that a new cost factor might outshine simple operations when it comes to choosing where to run systems; namely, legality itself. As businesses seek to optimize business processes to deliver the most competitive advantage at the lowest costs, it is quite likely that they will seek out ways to leverage legal loopholes around the world to get around barriers in any one country.
Now, this is just pie-in-the-sky thinking on my part, and there are 1000 holes here, but I think its worth going through the exercise of thinking this out. The problem is complicated, as there are different laws that apply to data and the processing being one on that data (as well as, in some jurisdictions, the record keeping about both the data and the processing). However, there are technical solutions available today for both data and processing that could allow a company to mix and match the geographies that give them the best legal leverage for the services they wish to offer:
Database Sharding/Replication
Conceptually, the simplest way to keep from violating any one jurisdiction's data storage or privacy laws is to not put the data in the jurisdiction. This would be hard to do, if not for some really cool data base sharding frameworks being released to the community these days.
Furthermore, replicate the data in multiple jurisdictions, but use the best-case instance of that data for processing happening in a given jurisdiction. In fact, by replicating a single data exchange into multiple jurisdictions at once, it becomes possible to move VMs from place to place without losing (read-only, at least) access to that data.
VMotion/LiveMotion
From a processing perspective, once you solve legally accessing the data from each jurisdiction, you can now move your complete processing state from place to place as processing requires, without losing a beat. In fact, with networks getting as fast as they are, transfer times at the heart of the Internet may be almost as fast as on a LAN, and those times are usually measured in the low hundreds of milliseconds.
So, run your registration process in the USA, your banking steps in Switzerland, and your gambling algorithms in the Bahamas. Or, market your child-focused alternative reality game in the US, but collect personal information exclusively on servers in Madagascar. It may still be technically illegal from a US perspective, but who do they prosecute?
As Leslie noted, our legislators must understand the economic impact of a law meant for a physical world on an online reality. As Nick noted, we seem to be treading into that mythical territory marked on maps with the words "Here Be Dragons", and the dragons are stirring.
Stumble It!
