A Web Based Approach to Virtual Appliance Creation, Programming and Management

The Internet and Web technology is advancing at a frantic pace, expanding into almost every aspect of our everyday life. One of the latest scientific activities for the Internet and the Web is the so-called pervasive or ubiquitous computing where networking plays a vital role in its core computational framework. In this, people are able to use the Internet and Web to manage the operation of embedded network devices, services and to coordinate their services in ways that create applications such as smart-homes, smart-offices, smart-cars etc, collectively referred to as intelligent environments. For ordinary people (non technologists) to be able to use this technology, it is required that the interaction between the users and the environment must be as transparent and simple as possible, employing intuitive and user-friendly interfaces wherever possible. A popular approach to empowering users to customise the functionality of their environments is via end-user programming. In this work-in-progress paper we describe an approach based on using a web based GUI to augment earlier work of ours concerning an end user programming paradigm known as Pervasive interactive Programming (PiP), in a way that makes it more flexible and easy to use. By doing this, we present a conceptual model and discuss the issues in developing and using this model. © 2010 IEEE

Technical Report on Deploying a highly secured OpenStack Cloud Infrastructure using BradStack as a Case Study

Cloud computing has emerged as a popular paradigm and an attractive model for providing a reliable distributed computing model.it is increasing attracting huge attention both in academic research and industrial initiatives. Cloud deployments are paramount for institution and organizations of all scales. The availability of a flexible, free open source cloud platform designed with no propriety software and the ability of its integration with legacy systems and third-party applications are fundamental. Open stack is a free and opensource software released under the terms of Apache license with a fragmented and distributed architecture making it highly flexible. This project was initiated and aimed at designing a secured cloud infrastructure called BradStack, which is built on OpenStack in the Computing Laboratory at the University of Bradford. In this report, we present and discuss the steps required in deploying a secured BradStack Multi-node cloud infrastructure and conducting Penetration testing on OpenStack Services to validate the effectiveness of the security controls on the BradStack platform. This report serves as a practical guideline, focusing on security and practical infrastructure related issues. It also serves as a reference for institutions looking at the possibilities of implementing a secured cloud solution.Comment: 38 pages, 19 figures

MOLNs: A cloud platform for interactive, reproducible and scalable spatial stochastic computational experiments in systems biology using PyURDME

Computational experiments using spatial stochastic simulations have led to important new biological insights, but they require specialized tools, a complex software stack, as well as large and scalable compute and data analysis resources due to the large computational cost associated with Monte Carlo computational workflows. The complexity of setting up and managing a large-scale distributed computation environment to support productive and reproducible modeling can be prohibitive for practitioners in systems biology. This results in a barrier to the adoption of spatial stochastic simulation tools, effectively limiting the type of biological questions addressed by quantitative modeling. In this paper, we present PyURDME, a new, user-friendly spatial modeling and simulation package, and MOLNs, a cloud computing appliance for distributed simulation of stochastic reaction-diffusion models. MOLNs is based on IPython and provides an interactive programming platform for development of sharable and reproducible distributed parallel computational experiments

A look at cloud architecture interoperability through standards

Enabling cloud infrastructures to evolve into a transparent platform while preserving integrity raises interoperability issues. How components are connected needs to be addressed. Interoperability requires standard data models and communication encoding technologies compatible with the existing Internet infrastructure. To reduce vendor lock-in situations, cloud computing must implement universal strategies regarding standards, interoperability and portability. Open standards are of critical importance and need to be embedded into interoperability solutions. Interoperability is determined at the data level as well as the service level. Corresponding modelling standards and integration solutions shall be analysed

A Generic Development and Deployment Framework for Cloud Computing and Distributed Applications

Cloud computing have paved the way for advance of IT-based demand services. This technology helps decrease operation costs, solve scalability issue and many more user and provider constraints. However, development and deployment of distributed applications on cloud environment becomes a more and more complex tasks. Cloud users must spend a lot of time to prepare, install and configure their applications on clouds. In addition, after development and deployment, the applications almost cannot move from a cloud to others due to the lack of interoperability between them. To address these problems, we present in this paper a novel development and deployment framework for cloud distributed applications/services. Our approach is based on abstraction and object-oriented programming technique, allowing users to easily and rapidly develop and deploy their services into cloud environment. The approach also enables service migration and interoperability among the clouds

An approach for virtual appliance distribution for service deployment

Fulfilling a service request in highly dynamic service environments may require deploying a service. Therefore, the effectiveness of service deployment systems affects initial service response times. On Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) cloud systems deployable services are encapsulated in virtual appliances. Services are deployed by instantiating virtual machines with their virtual appliances. The virtual machine instantiation process is highly dependent on the size and availability of the virtual appliance that is maintained by service developers. This article proposes an automated virtual appliance creation service that aids the service developers to create efficiently deployable virtual appliances in former systems this task was carried out manually by the developer. We present an algorithm that decomposes these appliances in order to replicate the common virtual appliance parts in IaaS systems. These parts are used to reduce the deployment time of the service by rebuilding the virtual appliance of the service on the deployment target site. With the prototype implementation of the proposed algorithms we demonstrate the decomposition and appliance rebuilding algorithms on a complex web service. © 2010 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved

Collaborative Solution Architecture for Developing a National Interoperability Framework in Romania

Interoperability framework is a set of standards and guidelines that describe how organizations have established or will establish to interact. The framework is not static, but one that adapts to the change of standards, administrative requirements and technology. It can be adapted to the socio - economic, political, cultural, linguistic, historical and geographical purposes and to a specific context or situation. The article aims to clarify the essential concepts necessary for outlining Romanian national interoperability framework and to propose collaborative solution architecture for its development, updating and maintaining.Interoperability Framework, National Interoperability Framework, European Interoperability Strategy, Collaborative Solution Architecture