ClouNS - A Cloud-native Application Reference Model for Enterprise Architects

The capability to operate cloud-native applications can generate enormous business growth and value. But enterprise architects should be aware that cloud-native applications are vulnerable to vendor lock-in. We investigated cloud-native application design principles, public cloud service providers, and industrial cloud standards. All results indicate that most cloud service categories seem to foster vendor lock-in situations which might be especially problematic for enterprise architectures. This might sound disillusioning at first. However, we present a reference model for cloud-native applications that relies only on a small subset of well standardized IaaS services. The reference model can be used for codifying cloud technologies. It can guide technology identification, classification, adoption, research and development processes for cloud-native application and for vendor lock-in aware enterprise architecture engineering methodologies

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

United We Stand? Exploring the Willingness to Cooperate Amongst Open Source Service Providers

Open Source Software (OSS) is an increasingly hot topic in the business domain. The adoption of OSS in organizations has experienced an increasing uptake in the last decade. One of the key benefits mentioned is the unlimited access to the source code, which enables large communities to continuously improve a software application and prevents vendor lock-in. How attractive these benefits may be, the market for OSS however remains limited. This paper reports a study, undertaken in the Netherlands, amongst 206 Open Source Software Service providers (with a 34% response rate) to determine whether service providers wanted to cooperate in an Association that will set quality levels and guarantees to its members and their customers

Maturity of Cloud Application Interoperability Frameworks for Small to Medium Enterprises

Cloud computing has many benefits and organisations have bought into the cost effective and elastic solutions provided by major players in the market. However, cloud computing and Cloud Service Providers (CSP) are still evolving, hence there are differences in how customers connect with each provider to the orchestrate application lifecycle management. A lack of standards can create vendor lock-in. This work investigates current research and possible solutions to the vendor lock-in problem through the use of Cloud Interoperability or multi-cloud frameworks. Software developers and organisations can use these frameworks which abstract the differences between CSPs and mitigate vendor lock-in. A reference web application, with compute intensive operations, was developed and then adapted to each framework to evaluate the usability and stability of each multi-cloud framework, scaling up and down the underlying virtual infrastructure to meet varied demand. Cost conscious Small to Medium Enterprises can use these frameworks to stay competitive by having the ability to switch CSPs quickly for more favourable costs or better performance. Overall this will lead to increased competition and more innovation between CSPs benefiting the customer once more

A Model Driven Framework for Portable Cloud Services

Cloud Computing is an evolving technology as it offers significant benefits like pay only for what you use, scale the resources according to the needs and less in-house staff and resources. These benefits have resulted in tremendous increase in the number of applications and services hosted in the cloud which inturn has resulted in increase in the number of cloud providers in the market. Cloud service providers have a lot of heterogeneity in the resources they use. They have their own servers, different cloud infrastructures, API’s and methods to access the cloud resources. Despite its benefits; lack of standards among service providers has caused a high level of vendor lock-in when a software developer tries to change its cloud provider. In this paper we give an overview on the ongoing and current trends in the area of cloud service portability and we also propose a new cloud portability platform. Our new platform is based on establishing feature models which offers the desired cloud portability. Our solution DSkyL uses feature models and domain model analysis to support development, customization and deployment of application components across multiple clouds. The main goal of our approach is to reduce the effort and time needed for porting applications across different clouds. This paper aims to give an overview on DSkyL

PaaS manager : a platform-as-a-service aggregation framework

The advent of Cloud Computing opened new opportunities in several areas, namely in the application development processes. As consequence, nowadays, PaaS (Platform-as-a-Service) service model allows simpler and flexible deployment strategies of applications, avoiding the need for dedicated networks, servers, stor- age, and other services. Within this context, several PaaS providers exist in the market, but each one having specific characteristics, proprietary technologies and Application Programming Interfaces (APIs). Based on such assumptions, this work addresses the challenge of devising a PaaS aggregation solution with the objective of unifying the information and management processes of applications created in PaaS environments. The proposed solution, denominated as PaaS Manager, take the form of a PaaS API aggregator aiming to struggle the existing lock-in in the PaaS market. In this perspective, this paper describes the specification, development and test of the proposed PaaS Manager solution. As result of this framework, end-users are able to select the most appropriate PaaS platform for an application, interacting with any supported vendor through a unique deployment and management interface.This work has been supported by FCT - Fundação para a Ciência e a Tecnologia within the Project Scope: PEst-OE/EEI/UI0319/2014

Cloud Abstraction Libraries: Implementation and Comparison

Vendor lock-in makes it difficult for an organization to port their services, application or data. Cloud providers are in race to provide the best-in-class storage, networking and compute resources. Many organizations are moving towards micro-services and cloud services architecture. It is very important for an infrastructure platform to offer a high-quality cloud computing environment consistently across multiple cloud platforms. To enable this, a collaborative yet an independent cloud abstraction service is required. The cloud abstraction library should support the basic use cases of delivery pipeline, service management, cloud operations and security service. Cloud interoperability standards helps to improve availability and scalability by providing cross organizational or vendor independent projects. An important aspect of cloud interoperability is development of standardized APIs to send and receive data, irrespective of the underlying cloud implementation. Cloud interoperability helps application and data portability between public clouds and private clouds. This thesis explores the role of open source libraries to use cloud specific features. Our work is to qualitatively and quantitatively evaluate Dasein cloud and jClouds against Amazon EC2 and Google Compute Engine. We believe that cloud standardization can be accelerated by implementations based on open source and open standards

Dynamic Virtual Network Reconfiguration Over SDN Orchestrated Multitechnology Optical Transport Domains

Network virtualization is an emerging technique that enables multiple tenants to share an underlying physical infrastructure, isolating the traffic running over different virtual infrastructures/tenants. This technique aims to improve network utilization, while reducing the complexities in terms of network management for operators. Applied to this context, software defined networking (SDN) paradigm can ease network configurations by enabling network programmability and automation, which reduces the amount of operations required from both service and infrastructure providers. SDN techniques are decreasing vendor lock-in issues due to specific configuration methods or protocols. Application-based Network Operations (ABNO) is a toolbox of key network functional components with the goal of offering application-driven network management. Service provisioning using ABNO may involve direct configuration of data plane elements or delegate it to several control plane modules. We validate the applicability of ABNO to multi-tenant virtual networks in multi-technology optical domains based on two scenarios, in which multiple control plane instances are orchestrated by the architecture. Congestion Detection and Failure Recovery, are chosen to demonstrate fast recalculation and reconfiguration, while hiding the configurations in the physical layer from the upper layer.Grant numbers : supported by the Spanish Ministry of Economy and Competitiveness through the project FARO (TEC2012-38119)