Foundations of efficient virtual appliance based service deployments

The use of virtual appliances could provide a flexible solution to services deployment. However, these solutions suffer from several disadvantages: (i) the slow deployment time of services in virtual machines, and (ii) virtual appliances crafted by developers tend to be inefficient for deployment purposes. Researchers target problem (i) by advancing virtualization technologies or by introducing virtual appliance caches on the virtual machine monitor hosts. Others aim at problem (ii) by providing solutions for virtual appliance construction, however these solutions require deep knowledge about the service dependencies and its deployment process. This dissertation aids problem (i) with a virtual appliance distribution technique that first identifies appliance parts and their internal dependencies. Then based on service demand it efficiently distributes the identified parts to virtual appliance repositories. Problem (ii) is targeted with the Automated Virtual appliance creation Service (AVS) that can extract and publish an already deployed service by the developer. This recently acquired virtual appliance is optimized for service deployment time with the proposed virtual appliance optimization facility that utilizes active fault injection to remove the non-functional parts of the appliance. Finally, the investigation of appliance distribution and optimization techniques resulted the definition of the minimal manageable virtual appliance that is capable of updating and configuring its executor virtual machine. The deployment time reduction capabilities of the proposed techniques were measured with several services provided in virtual appliances on three cloud infrastructures. The appliance creation capabilities of the AVS are compared to the already available virtual appliances offered by the various online appliance repositories. The results reveal that the introduced techniques significantly decrease the deployment time of virtual appliance based deployment systems. As a result these techniques alleviated one of the major obstacles before virtual appliance based deployment systems

Towards efficient virtual appliance delivery with minimal manageable virtual appliances

Infrastructure as a Service systems use virtual appliances to initiate virtual machines. As virtual appliances encapsulate applications and services with their support environment, their delivery is the most expensive task of the virtual machine creation. Virtual appliance delivery is a well-discussed topic in the field of cloud computing. However, for high efficiency, current techniques require the modification of the underlying IaaS systems. To target the wider adoptability of these delivery solutions, this article proposes the concept of minimal manageable virtual appliances (MMVA) that are capable of updating and configuring their virtual machines without the need to modify IaaS systems. To create MMVAs, we propose to reduce manageable virtual appliances until they become MMVAs. This research also reveals a methodology for appliance developers to incorporate MMVAs in their own appliances to enable their efficient delivery and wider adoptability. Finally, the article evaluates the positive effects of MMVAs on an already existing delivery solution: the Automated Virtual appliance creation Service (AVS). Through experimental evaluation, we present that the application of MMVAs not only increases the adoptability of a delivery solution but it also significantly improves its performance in highly dynamic systems. © 2013 IEEE

Quarterly Report (QR4)

In the fourth quarter, two beta releases of the StratusLab cloud distribution were made and deployed on the project's reference cloud infrastructure. The v1.0 production release is expected just after the close of Q4 due to the scheduling of the project's development sprints. The project continues to operate a production grid service over the StratusLab cloud distribution, demonstrating its functionality and stability. The project has also demonstrated the deployment of a grid site with the Claudia service manager with some autoscaling features

Quarterly Report (QR2)

In the second quarter, the project has successfully created the first public release of the StratusLab cloud distribution. To complement the release, the project participants have provided user support, deployed a reference infrastructure for outside users, and increased awareness of the release and the project. High-level features, including advanced service management features, have been defined and will be progressively added to the series of public releases leading to the v1.0 release due at the end of the first year

Periodic Report (PR1)

Comprehensive report of the first year of the StratusLab project

Network functions virtualization: the long road to commercial deployments

Network operators are under pressure to offer efficient network-based services while keeping service deployment costs to a minimum. Network functions virtualization (NFV) can potentially revolutionize network-based services bringing low-deployment costs for network operators. The NFV has been introduced to ultimately extend the non-proprietary and open-standard-based model to network and service deployments, significant improvements to today’s proprietary locked implementations. Notwithstanding the continuous efforts of both academia and industry to support the NFV paradigm, the current NFV solutions offered are still in its infancy. In this survey, we provide a detailed background of NFV to establish a comprehensive understanding of the subject, ranging from the basics to more advanced topics. Moreover, we offer a comprehensive overview of the NFV main concepts, standardization efforts, the benefits of NFV, and discussions of the NFV architecture as defined by the European telecommunications standardization institute (ETSI). Furthermore, we discuss the NFV applicability and current open source projects. We then highlight NFV requirements, design considerations, and developmental architectural impairments and barriers to commercial NFV deployments. Finally, we conclude enumerating future directions for NFV developmentpublishe

A survey on cyber security for smart grid communications

A smart grid is a new form of electricity network with high fidelity power-flow control, self-healing, and energy reliability and energy security using digital communications and control technology. To upgrade an existing power grid into a smart grid, it requires significant dependence on intelligent and secure communication infrastructures. It requires security frameworks for distributed communications, pervasive computing and sensing technologies in smart grid. However, as many of the communication technologies currently recommended to use by a smart grid is vulnerable in cyber security, it could lead to unreliable system operations, causing unnecessary expenditure, even consequential disaster to both utilities and consumers. In this paper, we summarize the cyber security requirements and the possible vulnerabilities in smart grid communications and survey the current solutions on cyber security for smart grid communications. © 2012 IEEE

Deployment of NFV and SFC scenarios

Aquest ítem conté el treball original, defensat públicament amb data de 24 de febrer de 2017, així com una versió millorada del mateix amb data de 28 de febrer de 2017. Els canvis introduïts a la segona versió són 1) correcció d'errades 2) procediment del darrer annex.Telecommunications services have been traditionally designed linking hardware devices and providing mechanisms so that they can interoperate. Those devices are usually specific to a single service and are based on proprietary technology. On the other hand, the current model works by defining standards and strict protocols to achieve high levels of quality and reliability which have defined the carrier-class provider environment. Provisioning new services represent challenges at different levels because inserting the required devices involve changes in the network topology. This leads to slow deployment times and increased operational costs. To overcome the current burdens network function installation and insertion processes into the current service topology needs to be streamlined to allow greater flexibility. The current service provider model has been disrupted by the over-the-top Internet content providers (Facebook, Netflix, etc.), with short product cycles and fast development pace of new services. The content provider irruption has meant a competition and stress over service providers' infrastructure and has forced telco companies to research new technologies to recover market share with flexible and revenue-generating services. Network Function Virtualization (NFV) and Service Function Chaining (SFC) are some of the initiatives led by the Communication Service Providers to regain the lost leadership. This project focuses on experimenting with some of these already available new technologies, which are expected to be the foundation of the new network paradigms (5G, IOT) and support new value-added services over cost-efficient telecommunication infrastructures. Specifically, SFC scenarios have been deployed with Open Platform for NFV (OPNFV), a Linux Foundation project. Some use cases of the NFV technology are demonstrated applied to teaching laboratories. Although the current implementation does not achieve a production degree of reliability, it provides a suitable environment for the development of new functional improvements and evaluation of the performance of virtualized network infrastructures

Laniakea : an open solution to provide Galaxy "on-demand" instances over heterogeneous cloud infrastructures

Background: While the popular workflow manager Galaxy is currently made available through several publicly accessible servers, there are scenarios where users can be better served by full administrative control over a private Galaxy instance, including, but not limited to, concerns about data privacy, customisation needs, prioritisation of particular job types, tools development, and training activities. In such cases, a cloud-based Galaxy virtual instance represents an alternative that equips the user with complete control over the Galaxy instance itself without the burden of the hardware and software infrastructure involved in running and maintaining a Galaxy server. Results: We present Laniakea, a complete software solution to set up a \u201cGalaxy on-demand\u201d platform as a service. Building on the INDIGO-DataCloud software stack, Laniakea can be deployed over common cloud architectures usually supported both by public and private e-infrastructures. The user interacts with a Laniakea-based service through a simple front-end that allows a general setup of a Galaxy instance, and then Laniakea takes care of the automatic deployment of the virtual hardware and the software components. At the end of the process, the user gains access with full administrative privileges to a private, production-grade, fully customisable, Galaxy virtual instance and to the underlying virtual machine (VM). Laniakea features deployment of single-server or cluster-backed Galaxy instances, sharing of reference data across multiple instances, data volume encryption, and support for VM image-based, Docker-based, and Ansible recipe-based Galaxy deployments. A Laniakea-based Galaxy on-demand service, named Laniakea@ReCaS, is currently hosted at the ELIXIR-IT ReCaS cloud facility. Conclusions: Laniakea offers to scientific e-infrastructures a complete and easy-to-use software solution to provide a Galaxy on-demand service to their users. Laniakea-based cloud services will help in making Galaxy more accessible to a broader user base by removing most of the burdens involved in deploying and running a Galaxy service. In turn, this will facilitate the adoption of Galaxy in scenarios where classic public instances do not represent an optimal solution. Finally, the implementation of Laniakea can be easily adapted and expanded to support different services and platforms beyond Galaxy