2016-01-28: January 2016 Federal Cloud Computing Summit

As I have mentioned previously, I am the MITRE chair of the Federal Cloud Computing summit. The Summits are designed to allow representatives from government agencies that would not necessarily cross paths to collaborate and learn from one another about the best practices, challenges, and recommendations for adopting emerging technologies in the federal government. The MITRE-ATARC Collaboration Symposium is a working group-style session in which academics, representatives from industry, government, and FFRDC representatives discuss potential solutions and ways-forward for the top challenges of emerging technology adoption in government. MITRE helps select the challenge areas by polling government practitioners on their top challenges, and the participants break into groups to discuss each challenge area. The Collaboration Symposium allows this heterogeneous group of cloud practitioners to collaborate across all levels, from the end users to researchers to practitioners to policy makers (at the officer level).

The Summit series includes mobile, Internet of Everything, big data, and cyber security summits along with the cloud summit, each of which occurs twice each year. MITRE produces a white paper that summarizes the MITRE-ATARC Collaboration Symposium. The white paper is shared with industry to communicate the top challenges and current needs of the federal government to guide product development, academia to identify the skillsets needed by the government and influence curricula development along with research topics, and government to communicate best practices and current challenges of other peer government agencies.

The Summit takes place in Washington, D.C. and is a full-day event. The day begins at 7:30 AM with registration and an industry trade show that allows industry representatives to communicate with government representatives about their challenges and the solutions that industry has to offer. At 9:00, a series of panel discussions by academic researchers and government. This also allows audience members to ask questions to the top implementers of cloud computing in the government and academia.

At 1:15, after lunch, the MITRE-ATARC Collaboration Symposium begins, and runs until 3:45. There is also a final out-briefing from each collaboration session a teh end of the day to communicate the major findings from each session to the summit participants.

Common threads from the summit included the importance of cloud security, the importance of incorporating other emerging technologies (e.g., mobile, big data, Internet of Things) in cloud computing, and how each emerging technology enables or enhances the others, and the importance of agile processes in cloud migration planning. More details on the outcomes will be included in the white paper, which should be released in 6-8 weeks. Prior white papers are available at the ATARC website.

The results of the Summit has implications for web archivists. With the increasing importance and emphasis on mobile, IoT, and cloud services, particularly within the government, there is an increased importance on archiving representations and the use of this material. As Julie Brill mentioned in her CNI talk, the government is interested in understanding how these services and technologies are being used regardless of whether or not there is a UI or other interface with which humans can interact. 

Archiving data endpoints from HTTP is comparatively trivial (although challenges still exist with archiving at high fidelity, particularly when considering JavaScript and deferred representations), but archiving a data service that might exchange data through non-HTTP or even push (as opposed to pull) transactions may change the paradigm used for web archiving.

With increased adoption, the archiving of representations reliant or designed to be consumed through emerging technologies will continue to increase and highlights a potential frontier in web archiving and digital preservation.


--Justin F. Brunelle *

* APPROVED FOR PUBLIC RELEASE; DISTRIBUTION UNLIMITED. CASE NUMBER 15-3250
The authors’ affiliation with The MITRE Corporation is provided for identification purposes only, and is not intended to convey or imply MITRE’s concurrence with, or support for, the positions, opinions or viewpoints expressed by the authors.

2015-01-15: The Winter 2015 Federal Cloud Computing Summit

On January 14th-15th, I attended the Federal Cloud Computing Summit in Washington, D.C., a recurring event in which I have participated in the past. In my continuing role as the MITRE-ATARC Collaboration Session lead, I assisted the host organization, the Advanced Technology And Research Center (ATARC) in organizing and run the MITRE-ATARC Collaboration Sessions. The summit is designed to allow Government representatives to meeting and collaborate with industry, academic, and other Government cloud computing practitioners on the current challenges in cloud computing.

The collaboration sessions continue to be highly valued within the government and industry. The Winter 2015 Summit had over 400 government or academic registrants and more than 100 industry registrants. The whitepaper summarizing the Summer 2014 collaboration sessions is now available.

A discussion of FedRAMP and the future of the policies was held in a Government-only session at 11:00 before the collaboration sessions began.

Standing room only as Matt Goodrich @MrFedRAMP @usgsa kicks off @atarclabs Cloud Summit http://t.co/2v8h38HtLg #cloudfeds
— Cloud Fed Summit (@cloudfeds) January 14, 2015

At its conclusion, the collaboration sessions began, with four sessions focusing on the following topics.

• Challenge Area 1: When to choose Public, Private, Government, or Hybrid clouds?
• Challenge Area 2: The umbrella of acquisition: Contracting pain points and best practices
• Challenge Area 3: Tiered architecture: Mitigating concerns of geography, access management, and other cloud security constraints
• Challenge Area 4: The role of cloud computing in emerging technologies

Because participants are protected by Chathan House Rule, I cannot elaborate on the Government representation or discussions in the collaboration sessions. MITRE will continue its practice of releasing a summary document after the Summit (for reference, see the Summer 2014 and Winter 2013 summit whitepapers).

On January 15th, I attended the Summit which is a conference-style series of panels and speakers with an industry trade-show held before the event and during lunch. At 3:25-4:10, I moderated a panel of Government representatives from each of the collaboration sessions in a question-and-answer session about the outcomes from the previous day's collaboration sessions.

To follow along on Twitter, you can refer to the Federal Cloud Computing Summit Handle (@cloudfeds), the ATARC Handle (@atarclabs), and the #cloudfeds hashtag.

Start 2015 with Complete Cloud Coverage: Federal Cloud Computing Summit on Jan. 15 in Washington, DC http://t.co/D0H6azP2Az
— Cloud Fed Summit (@cloudfeds) January 12, 2015

This was the fourth Federal Summit event in which I have participated, including the Winter 2013 and Summer 2014 Cloud Summits and the 2013 Big Data Summit. They are great events that the Government participants have consistently identified as high-value. The events also garner a decent amount of press in the federal news outlets and at MITRE. Please refer to the fedsummits.com list of press for the most recent articles about the summit.

We are continuing to expand and improve the summits, particularly with respect to the impact on academia. Stay tuned for news from future summits!

--Justin F. Brunelle

2014-07-10: Federal Cloud Computing Summit

As mention in my previous post, I attended the Federal Cloud Computing Summit on July 8th and 9th at the Ronald Reagan Building in Washington, D.C. I helped the host organization, the Advanced Technology And Research Center (ATARC) organize and run the MITRE-ATARC Collaboration Sessions that kick off the event on July 8th. The summit is designed to allow Government representatives to meeting and collaborate with industry, academic, and other Government cloud computing practitioners on the current challenges in cloud computing.

A FedRAMP primer was held at 10:00 AM on July 8th in a Government-only session. At its conclusion, we began the MITRE-ATARC Collaboration Sessions that focused on Cloud Computing in Austere Environments, Cloud Computing for the Mobile Worker, Security as a Service, and the Impact of Cloud Computing on the Enterprise. Because participants are protected by Chathan House Rule, I cannot elaborate on the Government representation or discussions in the collaboration sessions. MITRE will be constructing a summary document from the discussions that outlines the main points of the discussions, identifies orthogonal ideas between the challenge areas, and makes recommendations for the Government and academia based on the discussions. For reference, please see the 2013 Federal Cloud Computing Summit Whitepaper.

On July 9th, I attended the Summit which is a conference-style series of panels and speakers with an industry trade-show held before the event and during lunch. At 3:30-4:15, I moderated a panel of Government representatives from each of the collaboration sessions in a question-and-answer session about the outcomes from the previous day's collaboration sessions.

To follow along on Twitter, you can refer to the Federal Cloud Computing Summit Handle (@cloudfeds), the ATARC Handle (@atarclabs), and the #cloudfeds hashtag.

MITRE-ATARC Cloud Collaboration Symposium now underway at Federal Cloud Computing Summit http://t.co/gInaoTbZnj #cloudfeds @justinfbrunelle
— Cloud Fed Summit (@cloudfeds) July 8, 2014

This was the third Federal Summit event in which I have participated. They are great events that the Government participants have consistently identified as high-value and I am excited to start planning the Winter installment of the Federal Cloud Computing Summit.

--Justin F. Brunelle

2011-12-08: Summer Microsoft Internship

It all started in San Francisco airport while waiting to get my luggage on my way to the PDA2011 conference. The recruiter from Microsoft called me to inform me that I have been accepted to intern at Microsoft Silicon Valley this summer. I was ecstatic and after a couple of months of bureaucracy and a ton of documents I was ready to leave Norfolk by the end of May. Since I haven’t been on an adventure or a trip for a long time, and since I will definitely need a car in California for the three months of the summer, I decided to drive my car all across the continent. I have always wanted to make a road trip like that where I can stop in every city or town along the way, check out their attractions and eat from their authentic cuisines.

At the same time, our colleague and best friend Moustafa Aly managed to secure a job at Amazon’s engineering office in San Francisco. So when he knew I was going to drive all the way there he told me: “forget the plane, I will join you!”

We left Norfolk on the 24th, set the odometer of the car to 0 and having in mind since we are information retrieval and social networking people we will make our status updates and check-ins on Facebook our trip’s record keeper. We picked the route, filled up the car and drove. From Norfolk, stopping at Richmond and Nashville we drove through a tornado passing Tennessee, almost ran out of gas in Texas in the middle of no where, changed the clock twice in one day, eating the best steak I have ever had in Texas and the best burritos on earth in Las Cruses, playing with rockets in White sands missile range, passing over the Hoover dam and the burning the car’s AC compressor in the desert of Nevada we finally made it to Las Vegas where we wanted to spend an entire day relaxing. Next day we started driving and after 9 more hours we made it to San Francisco finishing 3559.6 miles in 5.5 days.

Working at Microsoft Silicon Valley definitely has its perks. The location was amazing and the engineers there are really incredible. I joined the office 365 server-side team for PowerPoint where I shared my office with another intern from UC Berkeley. Working with this team I had the most liberty I had in years working for companies. We sat together and set the goals I need to reach for this internship and they gave me the entire freedom to pick the way I was going to build it, which is more my style in working. I was supposed to start the implementation of a certain fraction of the distribution and investigate two other things but to my surprise they liked what I did with the first task so they decided to modify my internship goals to finish this project completely, reach ship quality and release it in the next version. With this I passed all the phases of software development from meeting with managers, architects and program managers to setting the design to development to finally quality and integration testing. Finally I had to demo my work to the three department managers to see if this could be incorporated in the next shipping release, and to my delight they were fascinated by it and it will be shipped!

The first day I attended the orientation and they gave us an overview to what we will be doing this summer and how are we going to be evaluated. Our mentors then came and took us and I was introduced to my team, the PowerPoint team. Immediately after that I was introduced to the available projects and I choose the one that was more appealing to me. Immediately after that I was granted permissions to access the codebase. Imagine having the source code of both PowerPoint and the server cloud back-end, it felt awesome! for the next two weeks I tried to break in the thousands of lines of code and produced a prototype proof of concept that I was on the right track. By the end of the first week I set my internship goals with my mentor but after the fast prototype I produced I was called to a meeting with both the test and the product management team, I was representing the development team. They decided to change my goals completely to actually build the entire feature and its backend support from scratch and have the opportunity to ship it. Knowing the task in hand of rebuilding the PowerPoint backend on the cloud with the appropriate interface to match the latest award-wining rich-client application I had to go back to the basics. I had several one-on-ones with the development team of PowerPoint client-side to understand piece by piece the functionality of each module of the application. The problem with a project like PowerPoint that it is fairly old and fairly stable with more than 20+ years of development and thousands of legacy code. I was completely lost in the beginning but my mentor didn't let me stumble much, I was practically staying in his office the first couple of weeks. We used C++ and C in the backend with javascript and C# for the matching interface. This was the trickiest part, the ability to match functionalities between two very different frameworks. At a certain point I found a severe gap in the design document related to the functionality. I talked with my manager and he told me a change like the one you want in the design document needs to be escalated. A couple of hours later I was sitting in a room full of Microsoft's elite developers, testers, PMs and managers, the least of which has 7 years work experience under his belt,...and me! That what I loved about Microsoft, even though I was just an intern I owned the project and they appreciated that. I explained my case and it was approved and the design document was changed! I was so proud of myself that day.

The atmosphere within the office was relaxing, cool, upbeat and always challenging. I can fairly say I was spoiled this summer. I was residing in the corporate housing complexes where I got a spacious studio apartment fully furnished with maid service that come clean weekly! Courts, swimming pool and a huge hot tub all provided for free within the apartment complex. Every other week the recruiters and the PR managers created an event, party or outing for all the interns on campus. We went hiking, bowling, watching movies and they even flew us to Seattle to visit the headquarters for the summer intern event. They paid flight tickets, the luxury hotel and even a car rental. Steven Sinofsky gave us a wonderful presentation where they show us classified sneak peeks to the all-new amazing Windows 8 and I was genuinely impressed. At the company store we got lots of t-shirts, games and gadgets with our employee discount. After that they rented the Zoo for us since we were about 1000 interns from all over the country and they got us the “Dave Matthews” band and gave each one of us a brand new xbox360 with Kinect!


It was definitely unique and rewarding to work with all those interns from the top universities all over the country: MIT, UC Berkeley, Stanford, …etc. I asked around and I found that I was the only representative from ODU so I was definitely proud and tried to behave. Me and the other interns became friends and since most of us are residing on the same apartment complex we gathered almost every night and on the weekends we went and discovered the city and the surrounding area. Unfortunately I didn’t join them in the Yosemite hiking/camping trip, as I was sick that day. One day we all decided to wear suits and sunglasses all day at work and call it "Brogramming" day. Someone took a photo of us and it gone viral on twitter and facebook!

In conclusion I feel honored and blessed for being able to work at this wonderful fascinating place with all those extremely intelligent colleagues. My manager/team lead told me on my first day one thing that I believe it changed everything. He said you were only an intern during the 2-hour orientation session, now consider yourself a full time software engineer and own your work. This definitely helped me to shine, participate, own my work, suggest enhancements, which actually were considered, and we changed the design document. Now, I can proudly say that my product is being used currently by millions of users; probably you are using it right now!

-- Hany SalahEldeen