Francesco D'Andria

MODAClouds: a model-driven approach for the design and execution of applications on multiple clouds

Cloud computing is emerging as a major trend in the ICT industry. While most of the attention of the research community is focused on considering the perspective of the Cloud providers, offering mechanisms to support scaling of resources and interoperability and federation between Clouds, the perspective of developers and operators willing to choose the Cloud without being strictly bound to a specific solution is mostly neglected. We argue that Model-Driven Development can be helpful in this context as it would allow developers to design software systems in a cloud-agnostic way and to be supported by model transformation techniques into the process of instantiating the system into specific, possibly, multiple Clouds. The MODAClouds (MOdel-Driven Approach for the design and execution of applications on multiple Clouds) approach we present here is based on these principles and aims at supporting system developers and operators in exploiting multiple Clouds for the same system and in migrating (part of) their systems from Cloud to Cloud as needed. MODAClouds offers a quality-driven design, development and operation method and features a Decision Support System to enable risk analysis for the selection of Cloud providers and for the evaluation of the Cloud adoption impact on internal business processes. Furthermore, MODAClouds offers a run-time environment for observing the system under execution and for enabling a feedback loop with the design environment. This allows system developers to react to performance fluctuations and to re-deploy applications on different Clouds on the long term.

SeaClouds: a European project on seamless management of multi-cloud applications

The adaptive management of complex applications deployed across multiple heterogeneous PaaS platforms is one of the problems that have emerged with the cloud revolution. The recently started EU research project SeaClouds aims at providing seamless adaptive multi-cloud management of complex applications by supporting the distribution, monitoring and migration of application modules over multiple heterogeneous PaaS platforms. We present the context, motivations and objectives of SeaClouds, its relation with other cloud initiatives, and its initial architecture.

Cloud4SOA: Multi-cloud Application Management Across PaaS Offerings

Cloud Platform as a Service (PaaS) is a novel paradigm that enables software developers to create (develop or integrate), deploy, execute, and manage business applications, using a service provided by a third party. The diversity and heterogeneity of the existing PaaS offerings raises several interoperability challenges. The actual Platform as a Service market is still quite young, chaotic and highly fragmented, dominated by a few providers which use and promote incompatible standards and formats. This introduces adoption barriers due to the lock-in issues that prevent the portability of data and software from one PaaS to another. Moreover, software developers do not only need to deploy applications into a specific Cloud platform, but also to migrate applications from one Cloud platform to another, and to manage distributed applications spanning multiple PaaS. In this paper, we present a multi-cloud PaaS management as a result of the Cloud4SOA European project that addresses these challenges.

Adaptive management of applications across multiple clouds: The SeaClouds Approach

How to deploy and manage, in an ecient and adaptive way, complex applications across multiple heterogeneous cloud platforms is one of the problems that have emerged with the cloud revolution. In this paper we present context, motivations and objectives of the EU research project SeaClouds, which aims at enabling a seamless adaptive multi-cloud management of complex applications by supporting the distribution, monitoring and migration of application modules over multiple heterogeneous cloud platforms. After positioning SeaClouds with respect to related cloud initiatives, we present the SeaClouds architecture and discuss some of its aspect, such as the use of the OASIS standard TOSCA and the compatibility with the OASIS CAMP initiative.

elasticLM: A Novel Approach for Software Licensing in Distributed Computing Infrastructures

A recent survey of the 451group on Cloud usage highlights software licensing as one of the top five obstacles for Cloud computing, quite similar to what has been observed in the Grid already a couple of years. The reasons are the same: the current praxis of software licensing, both in terms of business models and licensing technology. As a consequence, using commercial applications that require access to a license server for authorisation at run-time has been quite limited until recently in distributed computing environments, especially when the environment stretches across administrative domains like it is the case for public Clouds. In this paper we present a novel approach for managing software licenses as web service resources in distributed service oriented environments. Licenses become mobile objects, which may move to the environment where required to authorise the execution of a license protected application.

SLA-based management of software licenses as web service resources in distributed computing infrastructures

Until recently the use of applications requiring a software license for execution was quite limited in distributed environments. Due to the mandatory centralised control of license usage at application runtime, e.g. heartbeat control by the license server running at the home site of a user, traditional software licensing practices are not suitable especially when the distributed computing infrastructure stretches across administrative domains. In this paper we present a novel approach for managing software licenses as web service resources in distributed service oriented environments. Licenses become mobile objects, which may travel to the environment where required to authorise the execution of a license protected application. A first implementation has been realised for dynamic Grid environments in the European SmartLM project co-funded by the European Commission. The SmartLM solution decouples authorisation for license usage from authorisation for application execution. All authorisations are expressed as and guaranteed by Service Level Agreements. We will present the core technology, discuss various security aspects and how they are addressed in the SmartLM prototype, and present the evaluation of the prototype through a number of usage scenarios. Finally, we will give an outlook on specific issues and current work extending the solution to Clouds and service based systems in general.

Enabling risk assessment and analysis by event detection in dementia patients using a reconfigurable rule set

Chronic mental illnesses pose a great burden on the lives of citizens worldwide. In modern health-care, decentralization and enabling the self management of patients at home are crucial factors in improving the every-day lives of patients and the people close to them. People in general tend to dislike obtrusive monitoring on their daily activities, so how can we implement a platform that can provide clinicians with adequate and concise information on their patients health status and at the same time be unobtrusive and easy to use. Moreover, how can we make such an unobtrusive system capable of providing the doctor with high-impact warnings on the patients health status only when it is needed, thus relieving him of unnecessary workload? In this paper, the authors present a reconfigurable Event Detection mechanism used in the ALADDIN platform for Risk Assessment and Analysis.

SLA-based management of software licenses as web service resources in distributed environments

Until recently the use of applications requiring a software license for execution was quite limited in distributed environments. Due to the mandatory centralised control of license usage at application runtime, e.g. heartbeat control by the license server running at the home site of a user, traditional software licensing practices are not suitable especially when the distributed environment stretches across administrative domains. In this paper we present a novel approach for managing software licenses as web service resources in distributed service oriented environments. Licenses become mobile objects, which may move to the environment where required to authorise the execution of a license protected application. A first implementation has been realised for dynamic Grid environments in the European SmartLM project co-funded by the European Commission. The SmartLM solution decouples authorisation for license usage from authorisation for application execution. All authorisations are expressed as and guaranteed by Service Level Agreements. We will present the core technology, discuss various security aspects and how they are addressed in SmartLM, and present a number of usage scenarios leveraged by the SmartLM technology. Finally, we will give an outlook on specific issues and current work extending the solution to Clouds and service based systems in general.

Software licenses as mobile objects in distributed computing environments

Current praxis of software licensing has been identified as major obstacle for Grid computing a couple of years ago already. Recent surveys of Clouds indicate that the same holds true for Cloud computing. As a consequence, using commercial applications that require access to a license server for authorisation at run-time has been quite limited until recently in distributed computing environments. Due to the mandatory centralised control of license usage during application run-time traditional software licensing practices are not suitable. In this paper we present a novel approach for managing software licenses as web service resources in distributed service oriented environments. Licenses become mobile objects, which may move to the environment where required to authorise the execution of a license protected application. The SmartLM solution, which has been recently implemented as a prototype decouples authorisation for license usage from authorisation for application execution.

EU Project SeaClouds

The adaptive management of complex applications deployed across multiple heterogeneous PaaS platforms is one of the problems that have emerged with the cloud revolution. The ongoing EU research project SeaClouds aims at providing seamless adaptive multi-cloud management of complex applications by supporting the distribution, monitoring and migration of application modules over multiple heterogeneous PaaS platforms. In this paper we present context, motivations and objectives of SeaClouds, its relation with other cloud initiatives, and its initial architecture.