The future of Cloud computing: Elasticity, Legacy Support, Interoperability and Quality of Service

Organizers

Eleni Toli - University of Athens

Elisabetta Di Nitto - Politecnico di Milano

Ilias Spais - Athens Technology Center S.A.

Ioannis Konstantinou - ATHENA-IMIS

Proponent Projects:

ARTIST, CELAR, MODAClouds, SUCRE

Description

Participants of this session will have the opportunity to hear from leading European research projects about cutting-edge technological solutions related to Cloud computing and open issues that still need to be tackled.

Desirable Cloud computing features that are generally perceived as particularly important are still not optimally supported by existing platforms. This session will particularly focus on solutions that address problems related to elasticity, migration and interoperability. The presentations delivered by keynote speakers and the SUCRE, CELAR, MODAClouds, and ARTIST EU-funded projects, will facilitate the discussion that will follow. Presentations and discussion will address both, issues related to the level of Cloud adoption in Europe (SUCRE) as well as technological challenges such as elasticity, migration and interoperability (ARTIST, CELAR, MODAClouds).

Elasticity is the ability of the infrastructure (IaaS), platform (PaaS) or software (SaaS) to expand, or contract, dedicated resources in order to meet the exact demand / performance characteristics at runtime. During the session, a delegate from the CELAR project will:

Briefly present the CELAR technical results so far (application elasticity modelling, elasticity provisioning middleware architecture and first prototypes, automated decision making support, elastic monitoring and multiple IaaS cloud support).
Describe the two relevant elasticity-demanding use cases that will apply the CELAR project's results: one in the area of on-line Internet gaming and the other in the area of scientific computing. Both usecases are typical resource-hungry applications that may suffer from unpredictable workload patterns that require elastic resource scaling in an automated and real-time manner.
Present a brief demo where we will exhibit how a distributed application will be automatically scaled through the first CELAR prototype. The audience will be able to see through a comprehensive GUI a representative cycle of application description/submission/monitoring/management through CELAR; the main point of this demo will be to showcase the ability to automatically scale cloud resources to meet user-provided performance criteria.

Migration and interoperability issues will be addressed by the MODAClouds presentation. MODAClouds aims at supporting system developers and operators in exploiting multiple Clouds and in migrating their applications from Cloud to Cloud to avoid lock-in and cope with outages and variability of performance. In particular, the project focuses on the following objectives:

Deliver an advanced software engineering model-based approach and an Integrated Development Environment (IDE) to support systems developers in building and deploying applications, with related data, to multi-Clouds spanning across the full Cloud stack (IaaS/PaaS/SaaS).
Define quality measures, monitoring mechanisms, prediction models, and adaptive policies to provide quality assurance in Clouds and multi-Clouds.
Provide support to costs and risks to increase trust in Clouds.

The ARTIST presentation will also address migration issues, highlighting the business perspective. Cloud computing is still considered a disruptive technology even though it has been here for several years now. However, cloud computing is much more than that, it is a business model. Many companies that have sold software in a traditional way are now attending to this revolution wondering if that new technological and business shift is adequate for them and how they are to move their application towards the clouds, transforming alongside the company in a service-oriented company. ARTIST aims to guide companies in this transition by providing them with methods and tools, from when the migration is just a thought, until it can be provisioned as a service, taking into account technical, business and organizational aspects.

Another presentation will be delivered presenting the PaaSage project and the solution it provides for addressing the heterogeneity of cloud platforms. Through the PaaSage middleware environment, it is possible to characterise applications, users, data and platforms and to optimise deployment of applications across platform(s) based on these characteristics. Eventually, PaaSage manages to overcome platform heterogeneity and attempts to deploy applications optimally, thereby enabling interoperabiliy among heterogeneous cloud platforms.

FIA participants interested in Cloud computing will have the chance to be briefed by important players in the area on cutting edge cloud research, in a single session. All speakers delivering the presentations are researchers stemming from the public and private sector, and have a clear and profound understanding of the developments in the Cloud computing, while they also serve in parallel as mediators between the Cloud and the Future Internet communities.

In conclusion, the introductory presentations by the keynote speakers and the projects will set the scene and will provoke the discussion. The exchange between speakers and participants will be the main aim of the workshop.

Agenda

Introduction and overview of the workshop

15'

Presentation(s)

Alex Delis Professor, University of Athens Projects: SUCRE

1.Alex Delis.pdf

The Expert Group Challenge and the PaaSage Response

20'

Keynote

Over 3 reports the EC Expert Group on CLOUD Computing considered the required programme of research and development for Europe to gain a leading position CLOUD Computing. In particular it addressed infrastructure, systems development technologies and the legalistic and economic aspects. In particular the reports identified a large potential for European SMEs in providing services for CLOUD computing but this was hindered by the heterogeneity of infrastructure platforms. This heterogeneity makes porting application deployment difficult and costly and partitioning deployment extremely difficult. The PaaSage project was proposed partly to meet the challenges posed in the EC Expert Group reports. In particular PaaSage provides a middleware environment to characterise applications, users, data and platforms and to optimise deployment of applications across platform(s) based on these characteristics. A particular concern is to meet SLA (service level agreement) and QoS (quality of Service) criteria. In short, PaaSage overcomes platform heterogeneity and attempts to deploy applications optimally.

Prof. Keith G. Jeffery President ERCIM, Chair EC Cloud Expert Group

2.Keith Jeffery.pdf

ARTIST, a global approach to cloudify applications

20'

Presentation(s)

Cloud computing is still considered a disruptive technology even though it has been here for several years now. However, cloud computing is much more than that, it is a business model. Many companies that have sold software in a traditional way are now attending to this revolution wondering if that new technological and business shift is adequate for them and how they are to move their application towards the clouds, transforming alongside the company in a service oriented company. The European Project ARTIST aims to guide companies in this transition by providing them with a methodology, methods and tools, from when the migration is just a thought, until it can be provisioned as a service, taking into account technical, business and organizational aspects.

Ilias Spais Athens Technology Center S.A. Projects: ARTIST

5.Ilias Spais.pdf

SeaClouds: Open solution brings Interoperability & Portability to PaaS

20'

Keynote

Cloud Platform as a Service (PaaS) is still a novel but rapidly growing segment in the cloud computing market, offering an abstracted development and deployment environment that can simplify the life of a developer in any domain. However, unlike Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS), we are not dealing simply with raw compute and storage, but often a customised environment that builds on innovation more than IaaS commodity focused offerings.

This brings to light larger complications in interoperability, and particularly for PaaS, the concept of application portability. Developers and SaaS providers can benefit greatly from PaaS, but are often weary of the making an “all eggs in one basket” investment in a particular platform as-a-Service model, as well as the fear of finding themselves in a situation of vendor lock-in or incompatibility with other adopted solutions in parallel.

This is where SeaClouds comes into play, interconnecting public and private clouds vendors for the developer to help compare, manage and migrate between vendors. SeaClouds offers an open-source added value feature set for Clouds customers: developers and SaaS providers oriented towards SMEs, large industry or the public sector. Cloud providers can also leverage the benefits of being part of a larger ecosystem: gaining greater visibility and wider compatibility of third-party services via their existing API.

Francesco D'Andria ATOS, Project Manager Projects: SeaClouds

3.Francesco D' Andria.pdf

Cloud Computing - The SME and Industry Perspective

20'

Keynote

As industry uptake increases in the Cloud space, there's is an increasing demand from end-users and service providers for multi-grained elastic provisioning, resource scaling, interoperability and legacy systems integration. This triggers the need for service providers to innovate and differentiate themselves in the market place to provide these services.

Craig Sheridan Flexiant Limited, Head of Research Projects Projects: MODAClouds, CELAR, PaaSage, CACTOS

4.Craig Sheridan.pdf

Automatic cloud elasticity with CELAR

20'

Presentation(s)

Elasticity, i.e., the ability to scale up or down resources according to observed demand, is one of the most important requirements in today’s cloud applications. CELAR aims to provide automatic, multi-grained elasticity for generic applications in the cloud. CELAR will offer an adaptive and real time mechanism for the commitment of just the right amount of resources based on application demand, performance and requirements resulting in optimal use of infrastructure and significant reductions in costs.

CELAR covers the three layers required by an application to operate over the Cloud: the infrastructure layer, supporting two different IaaS providers, the monitoring/optimization middleware, supporting scalable and expressive collection of system metrics used to perform smart elasticity actions, and the programming development environment, allowing the users to to define the characteristics of their applications, launch them, submit jobs and monitor performance. This outcome can be bundled in a single software package for one-click installation of any application alongside its automated resource provisioning over a Cloud IaaS.

Both IaaS cloud providers and cloud application developers can benefit from the project’s outcome. The former can provide the elasticity feature as a service through their infrastructure and optimize their resource utilization. The latter can utilize the elasticity mechanisms to adapt their applications to quickly respond to unpredictable workload variations while being charged only for the resources they need. In this presentation we showcase CELAR’s results so far.

Ioannis Konstantinou ATHENA-IMIS Projects: CELAR

6.Ioannis Konstantinou.pdf

Improving agility of Cloud ecosystems with MODAClouds

15'

Presentation(s)

The talk will give a brief overview the MODAClouds project. The main goal of MODAClouds is to provide methods, a decision support system, an open source IDE and run-time environment for the high-level design, early prototyping, semi-automatic code generation, and automatic deployment of applications on multi-Clouds with guaranteed QoS. MODACLOUDS approach will simplify Cloud provider selection, avoid vendor lock-in problems, provide quality assurance during the application life-cycle, and support migration from Cloud to Cloud when needed.

Giuliano Casale Imperial College London Projects: MODAClouds

7.Giuliano Casale.pdf

Achieving Cloud Application Portability and Interoperability with mOSAIC - an Open-Source API and Platform for Multiple Clouds

10'

Presentation(s)

mOSAIC EU project offers a solution to the vendor lock-in problem that affects the IT companies and customers as they are dependent of the Cloud service providers since the Cloud applications are not usually portable from one Cloud to another. The final results of the consortium efforts are reflected in a set of new concepts and software prototypes. The main targeted users are the application developer, for whom mOSAIC is offering a new degree of freedom: the decision of which Cloud service to be used is postponed from the design phase to the deployment phase. The results that are distinguishing mOSAIC from other solutions for multiple Clouds are the followings:
• A new level of abstractions of the Cloud resources that allows not only an uniform access to multiple Clouds, but also to decouple from the inherited style of programming of the accessed services; the conceptual API is implemented currently in Java, Python and Erlang;
•Targeting the application developer, an entire set of tools was built for an easy design of the Cloud applications. Eclipse plug-ins, work-benchs, templates, and various front-ends, like web interfaces are able to assist the developer. In particular the Semantic Engine and Dynamic Semantic Discovery Service support the user in discovering the resources and services offered by mOSAIC and various Cloud providers, based on Application and Cloud Patterns, and perform their semiautomatic integration in the mOSAIC API. A machine readable (OWL) Cloud ontology has been defined at these purposes, which is being included in the IEEE Intercloud Standard. Another software prototype is the Personal Testbed Cluster that allows the development, testing and debugging of the codes on own desktop, and then, with the help of the other tools, to experience a seamless deployment in multiple Clouds;
• The selection of the Cloud service to be consumed is semi-automated in mOSAIC by a unique Cloud Agency, a multi-agent systems capable to broker and negotiate the resources and to establish the service-level-agreements with the selected Cloud(s) according to the needs of the applications, and to monitor and possibly dynamically reconfigure the resources provided; six Cloud commercial Cloud providers and six open-source and deployable infrastructure(-as-a-)services are currently connected;
• An open-source and deployable Platform-as-a-Service that is able to manage the selected resources, as well as the application components; particular features are related to the full control of the life-cycle of the application individual components, not encountered elsewhere.
• A set of innovative applications relying upon infrastructure and software services from multiple Clouds.