LegalCloud.net Update: Enterprise Cloud Computing for Law Firms

Today Mark and I ran a webinar on Total Data Protection for Law Firms and have posted it to our video stream.

I wanted to do a quick post this morning to discuss this since it is almost entirely my focus these last few months.

Total Data Protection is the name of our Enterprise Class Hybrid Cloud Computing service that provides the ability for any Law Firm to provide business continuity for their enterprise compute workloads no matter where they are by leveraging our software stack and Private/Community Cloud deployments throughout the world.

In that definition of Total Data Protection I used some deployment model terms from the NIST definition of Cloud Computing; draft v14.  To review, those deployment models are:

Private cloud. The cloud infrastructure is operated solely for an organization. It may be managed by the organization or a third party and may exist on premise or off premise.

Community cloud. The cloud infrastructure is shared by several organizations and supports a specific community that has shared concerns (e.g., mission, security requirements, policy, and compliance considerations). It may be managed by the organizations or a third party and may exist on premise or off premise.

Public cloud. The cloud infrastructure is made available to the general public or a large industry group and is owned by an organization selling cloud services.

Hybrid cloud. The cloud infrastructure is a composition of two or more clouds (private, community, or public) that remain unique entities but are bound together by standardized or proprietary technology that enables data and application portability (e.g., cloud bursting).

LegalCloud.net is a true Hybrid Cloud as it is a combination of Private and Community and provides services both on-premise and off-premise.  It is shared by an organization, that organization is the aggregate of all Law Firms.  If you are not a law firm, you can't use LegalCloud.net.  Period.

We are working very hard to address all the common concerns about enterprise cloud computing.  We specifically address things like auditing, compliance, network security, data security, transparency, data location and the legal Issues surrounding it.

We have other products related to or complimentary to Total Data Protection on the way and in testing.  We'll be deploying our client facing console, a really cool distributed Rails (on the front) and Java (in part of the backend) application, in a very short few weeks to the first clients.  Clients will be able to deploy Total Data Protection, Active Servers, and Provision storage in our globally distributed data centers through this interface.  Our first release will not have a clent facing API unfortunately, but we're trying not to boil the ocean you know.  However, I have started working on this by studying the best of the available API's out there and expect to move forward on specification and early development stages soon.  Of course, the API will not be public, it'll only be available to members of our cloud commnity; law firms.  But, that is the point in our case.

When I started nScaled I never imagined I'd be building a cloud quite like this one.  But, it's exciting to be sure.  My blogging certainly has taken a hit but that's okay I suppose.  Over time I'll be able to blog more and more about the various things we've been doing.

Kent now returns to his usual daily program of coffee, phone calls, infrastructure, and sales calls... 

---Kent Langley, CTO, www.legalcloud.net by nScaled, Inc.

Using Curl to Access the Rackspace Cloud API

I've been playing around w/ the Rackspace Cloud API quite a bit. Then, today I got an email from a reader of this blog asking me how it works more or less. So, I thought I'd post a couple of the examples I've been using. In the absense of a fancy GUI to control cloud servers I've simply been using Curl and writing little shell scripts to get the job done.

Authentication Request

curl -D - \
  -H "X-Auth-Key: youneedtoputyourownauthkeyhere" \
  -H "X-Auth-User: acctusr" \
  https://auth.api.rackspacecloud.com/v1.0

Authentication Response

HTTP/1.1 204 No Content

Date: Sat, 25 Jul 2009 15:44:07 GMT
Server: Apache/2.2.3 (Mosso Engineering)
X-Storage-Token: 8gc00ld-a77r-6548-eq58-5nb5hsrv9876
X-Storage-Url: https://storage.clouddrive.com/v1/MossoCloudFS_8gaserd-65q3-5dfas-8888-c66e9987r953
X-Auth-Token: aq9beanS-d75c-9135-ed78-4bs3chse9135
X-CDN-Management-Url: https://cdn.clouddrive.com/v1/MossoCloudFS_d96e4c99-85ej-2pol-7777-v33e9135e669
X-Server-Management-Url: https://servers.api.rackspacecloud.com/v1.0/928875
Content-Length: 0
Connection: close
Content-Type: application/octet-stream

These aren't real tokens so you can't use them yourself of course. You need to get your own, which is exactly the point. Once you have successfully received your own response then you can move on to actually using other API calls to do things with the API. Here is a cloud servers API example using curl again.

Listing Your Account Limits

curl -D - \
  -H "X-Auth-Token: aq9beanS-d75c-9135-ed78-4bs3chse9135" \
  https://servers.api.rackspacecloud.com/v1.0/928875/limits

That will output something that looks like this:

HTTP/1.1 200 OK
Server: Apache-Coyote/1.1
vary: Accept, Accept-Encoding
Set-Cookie: JSESSIONID=D6DBBE0BE05C4559BC71E6F851501575; Path=/v1.0
Cache-Control: s-maxage=1800
Last-Modified: Sat, 25 Jul 2009 15:51:26 GMT
Content-Type: application/json
Content-Length: 657
Date: Sat, 25 Jul 2009 15:51:26 GMT
X-Varnish: 1753447558
Age: 0
Via: 1.1 varnish
Connection: keep-alive

{"limits":{"absolute":{"maxTotalRAMSize":51200,"maxIPGroupMembers":25,"maxIPGroups":25},"rate":[{"value":25,"unit":"DAY","verb":"POST","remaining":25,"URI":"\/servers*","resetTime":1248537086,"regex":"^\/servers"},{"value":10,"unit":"MINUTE","verb":"POST","remaining":10,"URI":"*","resetTime":1248537086,"regex":".*"},{"value":600,"unit":"MINUTE","verb":"DELETE","remaining":600,"URI":"*","resetTime":1248537086,"regex":".*"},{"value":3,"unit":"MINUTE","verb":"GET","remaining":3,"URI":"*changes-since*","resetTime":1248537086,"regex":"changes-since"},{"value":10,"unit":"MINUTE","verb":"PUT","remaining":10,"URI":"*","resetTime":1248537086,"regex":".*"}]}}

Here is a very simple bash shell script you could use for the Authentication example above:

#!/bin/sh

curl -D - \
  -H "X-Auth-Key: 5115a48a9ca852bc266ea3e7bc8805e7" \
  -H "X-Auth-User: nscaled" \
  https://auth.api.rackspacecloud.com/v1.0

I know that there are at least a couple of companies with growing support via their cloud management platforms quickly adding Rackspace Cloud functionalities.  So, while I have to hack around with curl today I suspect that in short order it might get easier.

Cheer!

Kent

AR, Surface, Advertisements, Cloud, privacy, oh my

I ran into an interesting post today on a blog I frequent.  It showed a Microsoft "Second Light" demonstration of I suppose what is a newer version of the Microsoft Surface technology.

The link: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XfzplPIrzjY&eurl=http://gamesalfresco.com/2009/02/02/stimulant-xray-exposes-whats-under-the-microsoft-surface/&feature=player_embedded

Now, let's just imagine that I am wearing plain old sunglasses (what they call a cheap bit of plastic in the video).  I come upon a nice looking visual advertisement in the street; say at a bus stop.  Or, I'm thinking of a visual map I saw in a mall in San Francisco recently.  I stop to watch it and then, it watches me.  It analyzes my face.  It decides it either knows who I am because it's seen me before or guesses close enough based on my features based on some kind of algorithm.  Or, I'm registered perhaps by shopping at a store in the mall.  Remember, your glasses are the 2nd diffuser they discuss in the video.  Or, you can just hold up a bit of plastic or trace paper for the special advertisement just for you.  Your face is the ad target.  You can watch the ad without your glasses and see the generic information.  You can watch the ad with you glasses and get a very interesting and targeted personal advertisement.

The Source Blog: http://gamesalfresco.com/2009/02/02/stimulant-xray-exposes-whats-under-the-microsoft-surface/

Interesting indeed.  Perhaps a little off topic for this blog.  But, not so much when you realize the amount and variability of computing that will have to go on very quickly in the background to support such an application.  That, my friends, will most likely be done on a Cloud Computing or Cloud-Like Infrastructure and a distributed asynchronous application for the search; something map-reduce I'd imagine.  Perhaps it'll have an nVidia Tesla based "supercomputer" inside to do much of the heavy calculations locally inside the display only reaching out over the network for the bits it needs; as little as possible.

If you want to fund this idea, just drop me line.  :)  Very fun!  Intrusive maybe.  But, it's coming one way or another.  These are interesting and exiting times I think.

Big News! It's Alive! nScaled, Inc. Launches

On January 26th 2009 I started my first day of my new employment! I now work for a Cloud Services consulting company nScaled, Inc. as CTO and Co-Founder. In short, nScaled works closely with businesses to analyze the impacts of moving all or part of their computing needs to cloud computing services and products safely and securely. We then help the company make the transition to cloud computing technologies as appropriate for their situation.

You may have noted that I said co-founder.  I’m also very pleased to announce that I have partnered with Mark Hadfield in this effort. Mark is a very successful entrepreneur and is known for his leading role as co-founder and COO of WorkShare, a pioneer and leader in legal document content management. I am very happy to be working with Mark now in this new business endeavor.

Some might note that this means I have left Joyent.  I have been working at Joyent for the last six months. It went by very fast and it was an eye opening experience.  I have a lot of respect for Joyent, it's technology, and its people. My time at Joyent was invaluable and I am happy to say that we'll continue working together exciting new projects.

I’ll be continuing to do my primary blogging efforts here at ProductionScale for the most part.  While I've been remiss on doing it for a couple of months I have become a little attached.   Temporarily, this will actually be the company blog since I haven't setup a new one yet for the company.  I'm trying to get back into the swing of things with regular posting and finish all the 70% done posts I have laying around!

So, as always, thank you for reading my blog and here's to a great and productive 2009!