This weekend I am heading to Brussels for meetings with the European Commission, specifically with Vice-president Neelie Kroes who owns the Digital Agenda for the EU, about how to accelerate cloud usage in both business and government in Europe.

I am bringing with me a paper with one of first distributed systems that had actually see wide-spread commercial deployment. The Andrew File System (AFS) was developed at CMU and was much more than just a distributed file systems and had a very interesting caching and volume replication architecture.

Scale and performance in a distributed file system, John H. Howard, Michael L. Kazar, Sherri G. Menees, David A. Nichols, M. Satyanarayanan, Robert N. Sidebotham, and Michael J. West, ACM Trans. on Computer Systems 6(1), February 1988, pp. 51-81.