Enabling End-To-End Orchestration of Multi-Cloud Applications

The orchestration of application components across heterogeneous cloud providers is a problem that has been tackled using various approaches, some of which led to the creation of cloud orchestration and management standards, such as TOSCA and CAMP. Standardization is a definitive method of providing an end-To-end solution capable of defining, deploying, and managing applications and their components across heterogeneous cloud providers. TOSCA and CAMP, however, perform different functions with regard to cloud applications. TOSCA is focused primarily on topology modeling and orchestration, whereas CAMP is focused on deployment and management of applications. This paper presents a novel solution that not only involves the combination of the emerging standards TOSCA and CAMP, but also introduces extensions to CAMP to allow for multi-cloud application orchestration through the use of declarative policies. Extensions to the CAMP platform are also made, which brings the standards closer together to enable a seamless integration. Our proposal provides an end-To-end cloud orchestration solution that supports a cloud application modeling and deployment process, allowing a cloud application to span and be deployed over multiple clouds. The feasibility and the benefit of our approach are demonstrated in our validation study

Towards a unified management of applications on heterogeneous clouds

J. Carrasco, F. Durán y E. Pimentel. "Towards a Unified Management of Applications on Heterogeneous Clouds". Proceedings of the PhD Symposium at the 5th European Conference on Service-Oriented and Cloud Computing. G. Zavattaro and W. Zimmermann (eds). University Halle-Wittenberg. Technical Report 2016/02, 40-47. 2016.The diversity in the way cloud providers o↵er their services, give their SLAs, present their QoS, or support di↵erent technologies, makes very difficult the portability and interoperability of cloud applications, and favours the well-known vendor lock-in problem. We propose a model to describe cloud applications and the required resources in an agnostic, and providers- and resources-independent way, in which individual application modules, and entire applications, may be re-deployed using different services without modification. To support this model, and after the proposal of a variety of cross-cloud application management tools by different authors, we propose going one step further in the unification of cloud services with a management approach in which IaaS and PaaS services are integrated into a unified interface. We provide support for deploying applications whose components are distributed on different cloud providers, indistinctly using IaaS and PaaS services.Universidad de Málaga. Campus de Excelencia Internacional Andalucía Tech

SeaClouds: An Open Reference Architecture for Multi-Cloud Governance

A. Brogi, J. Carrasco, J. Cubo, F. D'Andria, E. Di Nitto, M. Guerriero, D. Pérez, E. Pimentel, J. Soldani. "SeaClouds: An Open Reference Architecture for Multi-Cloud Governance". In B. Tekinerdogan et al. (Eds.): ECSA 2016, LNCS 9839, pp. 334–338, 2016.We present the open reference architecture of the SeaClouds solution. It aims at enabling a seamless adaptive multi-cloud management of complex applications by supporting the distribution, monitoring and reconfiguration of app modules over heterogeneous cloud providers.Universidad de Málaga. Campus de Excelencia Internacional Andalucía Tech

Adaptive management of applications across multiple clouds:the SeaClouds approach

How to deploy and manage, in an efficient 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

SeaClouds: Agile management of complex applications across multiple heterogeneous clouds

SeaClouds is a European FP7 research project, whose goal is to develop a novel open solution to provide developers with the capabilities to design, configure, deploy, and manage complex applications across multiple heterogeneous clouds in an efficient and adaptive way

Towards a flexible deployment of multi-cloud applications based on TOSCA and CAMP

Cloud Computing platforms offer diverse services and capabilities with own features. Hence, the provider services could be used by end users to compose a heterogeneous context of multiple cloud platforms in order to deploy their cloud applications made up of a set of modules, according to the best capabilities of the cloud providers. However, this is an ideal scenario, since the cloud platforms are being conducted in an isolated way by presenting many interoperability and portability restrictions, which complicate the integration of diverse provider services to achieve an heterogeneous deployment of multi-cloud applications. In this ongoing work, we present an approach based on model transformation to deploy multi-cloud applications by reusing standardization e orts related to the management and deployment of cloud applications. Specifically, using mechanisms speci ed by both standards, TOSCA and CAMP, we propose a methodology to describe the topology and distribution of modules of a cloud application and to deploy the interconnected modules over heterogeneous clouds. We illustrate our idea using a running example.Work partially supported by projects TIN2012-35669, funded by Spanish Ministry MINECO, FEDER; P11-TIC-7659 funded by Andalusian Gov; FP7-610531 SeaClouds funded by EU; and Universidad de Málaga. Campus de Excelencia Internacional Andalucía Tech

Unified Management of Applications on Heterogeneous Clouds

La diversidad con la que los proveedores cloud ofrecen sus servicios, definiendo sus propias interfaces y acuerdos de calidad y de uso, dificulta la portabilidad y la interoperabilidad entre proveedores, lo que incurre en el problema conocido como el bloqueo del vendedor. Dada la heterogeneidad que existe entre los distintos niveles de abstracción del cloud, como IaaS y PaaS, hace que desarrollar aplicaciones agnósticas que sean independientes de los proveedores y los servicios en los que se van a desplegar sea aún un desafío. Esto también limita la posibilidad de migrar los componentes de aplicaciones cloud en ejecución a nuevos proveedores. Esta falta de homogeneidad también dificulta el desarrollo de procesos para operar las aplicaciones que sean robustos ante los errores que pueden ocurrir en los distintos proveedores y niveles de abstracción. Como resultado, las aplicaciones pueden quedar ligadas a los proveedores para las que fueron diseñadas, limitando la capacidad de los desarrolladores para reaccionar ante cambios en los proveedores o en las propias aplicaciones. En esta tesis se define trans-cloud como una nueva dimensión que unifica la gestión de distintos proveedores y niveles de servicios, IaaS y PaaS, bajo una misma API y hace uso del estándar TOSCA para describir aplicaciones agnósticas y portables, teniendo procesos automatizados, por ejemplo para el despliegue. Por otro lado, haciendo uso de las topologías estructuradas de TOSCA, trans-cloud propone un algoritmo genérico para la migración de componentes de aplicaciones en ejecución. Además, trans-cloud unifica la gestión de los errores, permitiendo tener procesos robustos y agnósticos para gestionar el ciclo de vida de las aplicaciones, independientemente de los proveedores y niveles de servicio donde se estén ejecutando. Por último, se presentan los casos de uso y los resultados de los experimentos usados para validar cada una de estas propuestas

Cloud resource orchestration in the multi-cloud landscape: a systematic review of existing frameworks

The number of both service providers operating in the cloud market and customers consuming cloud-based services is constantly increasing, proving that the cloud computing paradigm has successfully delivered its potential. Nevertheless, the unceasing growth of the cloud market is posing hard challenges on its participants. On the provider side, the capability of orchestrating resources in order to maximise profits without failing customers’ expectations is a matter of concern. On the customer side, the efficient resource selection from a plethora of similar services advertised by a multitude of providers is an open question. In such a multi-cloud landscape, several research initiatives advocate the employment of software frameworks (namely, cloud resource orchestration frameworks - CROFs) capable of orchestrating the heterogeneous resources offered by a multitude of cloud providers in a way that best suits the customer’s need. The objective of this paper is to provide the reader with a systematic review and comparison of the most relevant CROFs found in the literature, as well as to highlight the multi-cloud computing open issues that need to be addressed by the research community in the near future

Critical analysis of vendor lock-in and its impact on cloud computing migration: a business perspective

Vendor lock-in is a major barrier to the adoption of cloud computing, due to the lack of standardization. Current solutions and efforts tackling the vendor lock-in problem are predominantly technology-oriented. Limited studies exist to analyse and highlight the complexity of vendor lock-in problem in the cloud environment. Consequently, most customers are unaware of proprietary standards which inhibit interoperability and portability of applications when taking services from vendors. This paper provides a critical analysis of the vendor lock-in problem, from a business perspective. A survey based on qualitative and quantitative approaches conducted in this study has identified the main risk factors that give rise to lock-in situations. The analysis of our survey of 114 participants shows that, as computing resources migrate from on-premise to the cloud, the vendor lock-in problem is exacerbated. Furthermore, the findings exemplify the importance of interoperability, portability and standards in cloud computing. A number of strategies are proposed on how to avoid and mitigate lock-in risks when migrating to cloud computing. The strategies relate to contracts, selection of vendors that support standardised formats and protocols regarding standard data structures and APIs, developing awareness of commonalities and dependencies among cloud-based solutions. We strongly believe that the implementation of these strategies has a great potential to reduce the risks of vendor lock-in