Goal
The Mass Open Cloud Alliance (MOC Alliance) will create an open production cloud that: 1) provides domain researchers with predictable low cost resources and facilitator support while, 2) enabling academic researchers and developers in the open source community to participate in the kind of close collaboration between research, development and operations that has resulted in so much innovation in today’s public clouds.
Vision
The MOC Alliance is a partnership between higher education, medical research centers, government, and industry to provide the structure and resources that will enable collaboration between operators of production cloud services for domain researchers, the open source community developing cloud technologies, and system researchers innovating in the cloud. The MOC Alliance will create an open production cloud that: 1) provides domain researchers with predictable low cost resources and facilitator support while, 2) enabling academic researchers and developers in the open source community to participate in the kind of close collaboration between research, development and operations that has resulted in so much innovation in today’s public clouds. Development will be informed by the needs of a production cloud with real users, and the production cloud will be able to rely on developers to jump in and resolve problems when they occur. Researchers and developers will be able to explore new ideas based on real information about cloud usage. They will be able to expose experimental services and hardware to the domain researchers that use the cloud. Researchers and open source developers will work together on compelling ideas, enabling realistic systems research on open source systems at scale, and providing a rapid path for integration of research ideas into upstream software (with potentially new or prototype hardware), exposed as experimental services and then deployed in production when they have demonstrated value.