Ana Juan Ferrer

Towards Secure Cloud Bursting, Brokerage and Aggregation

The cloud based delivery model for IT resources is revolutionizing the IT industry. Despite the marketing hype around “the cloud”, the paradigm itself is in a critical transition state from the laboratories to mass market. Many technical and business aspects of cloud computing need to mature before it is widely adopted for corporate use. For example, the inability to seamlessly burst between internal cloud and external cloud platforms, termed cloud bursting, is a significant shortcoming of current cloud solutions. Furthermore, the absence of a capability that would allow to broker between multiple cloud providers or to aggregate them into a composite service inhibits the free and open competition that would help the market mature. This paper describes the concepts of cloud bursting and cloud brokerage and discusses the open management and security issues associated with the two models. It also presents a possible architectural framework capable of powering the brokerage based cloud services that is currently being developed in the scope of OPTIMIS, an EU FP7 project.

Demonstration of the OPTIMIS toolkit for cloud service provisioning

We demonstrate the OPTIMIS toolkit for scalable and dependable service platforms and architectures that enable flexible and dynamic provisioning of Cloud services. The innovations demonstrated are aimed at optimizing Cloud services and infrastructures based on aspects such as trust, risk, eco-efficiency, cost, performance and legal constraints. Adaptive self-preservation is part of the toolkit to meet predicted and unforeseen changes in resource requirements. By taking into account the whole service life cycle, the multitude of future Cloud architectures, and a by taking a holistic approach to sustainable service provisioning, the toolkit provides a foundation for a reliable, sustainable, and trustful Cloud computing industry.

Multi-cloud Platform-as-a-service Model, Functionalities and Approaches

Abstract Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) is the Cloud area concentrating the major growth in the last years in terms of adoption and market share. At the same time Cloud models are evolving towards Hybrid Clouds through the consideration of service expansion across a diversity of Cloud offerings. So far, the majority of multi-cloud approaches have explored IaaS layer, neglecting the rest of the Cloud stack. This limits enterprises to enjoy the benefits of an agile, automated and adaptable infrastructure though flexibility provided by PaaS multi-cloud. This paper presents and compares results of two research projects addressing PaaS multi-cloud architectures: ASCETiC and SeaClouds.

ASCETiC - Adapting Service lifeCycle towards EfficienT Clouds

Reducing energy consumption is increasingly gaining attention in the area of Cloud computing, as means to reduce costs and improve corporate sustainability image. ASCETiC is focused on providing novel methods and tools to support software developers to optimise energy efficiency and minimise the carbon footprint resulting from developing, deploying and running software in Clouds. At the same time, quality of service, experience and perception are still taken into account, so energy efficiency will complement them and boost Cloud efficiency at several dimensions. ASCETiC primary focus is to relate software design and energy use, which will depend on the deployment conditions and the correct operation of the software by means of an adaptive environment. This paper presents specific objectives for the project, as well as requirements, business goals and architecture for the resultant Open Source Cloud stack providing energy efficiency at software, platform and infrastructure Cloud layers.

BASMATI: An Architecture for Managing Cloud and Edge Resources for Mobile Users

The BASMATI architecture is designed to improve the service quality perceived by end-users. In particular, it focuses on the support of applications that offer services to mobile end-users, ranging from those crossing national borders to those roaming around locally and who both need access to widely dispersed cloud resources. To achieve this, the architecture of BASMATI is built around the concepts of cloud federation and offloading, embodying both heterogeneous resources of different cloud providers and various computational devices located at the edge of the network with different access policies. The BASMATI architecture leverages intelligent decision support for brokering resources, user mobility modeling, a highly reactive management of applications, and a business-oriented cloud federation logic, to drive the efficient and proactive allocation of services onto proper cloud resources. Within this paper, we describe the architectural requirements and the architecture, overview.

Inter-cloud Research: Vision for 2020

Abstract Inter-cloud Challenges, Expectations and Issues Cluster objective is to enable collaboration among European Research projects addressing topics of multi-cloud and inter-cloud. Today these projects analyze the question from diverse perspectives and focusing on specific parts of the problem. This position paper provides the work done in collaboration by all these projects to define research areas and challenges for 2020. It identifies a Clusters vision of Inter-Cloud topics development by 2020, as well as, research areas in order to realize the provided vision. An extended version of this work is available on the Inter-Cloud Cluster position paper 1,2.

Bringing it all Together

In this chapter we first summarise the business challenges the innovation opportunities in each thematic area (Sect. 9.1). Then we explain the dependences between the common technical requirements in each area (Sect. 9.2). Afterwards we summarise the common capabilities developed by the BEinGRID programme in order to address these opportunities (Sect. 9.3). Section 9.4 presents examples of scenarios where a large number of these innovations are brought together in order to solve a complex problem. The focus of this section is to stress the “plug-n-play” approach allowed by the BEinGRID Common Capabilities, validating it through integration scenarios, that demonstrates how identified capabilities are combined.