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

Model-Driven Configuration Management of Cloud Applications with OCCI

International audienceTo tackle the cloud-provider lock-in, the Open Grid Forum (OGF) is developing the Open Cloud Computing Interface (OCCI), a standardized interface for managing any kind of cloud resources. Besides the OCCI Core model, which defines the basic modeling elements for cloud resources, the OGF also defines extensions that reflect the requirements of different cloud service levels, such as IaaS and PaaS. However, so far the OCCI PaaS extension is very coarse grained and lacks of supporting use cases and implementations. Especially, it does not define how the components of the application itself can be managed. In this paper, we present a model-driven framework that extends the OCCI PaaS extension and is able to use different configuration management tools to manage the whole lifecycle of cloud applications. We demonstrate the feasibility of the approach by presenting four different use cases and prototypical implementations for three different configuration management tools

A Model-Driven Tool Chain for OCCI

International audienceOpen Cloud Computing Interface (OCCI) is the only open standard for managing any kinds of cloud resources, e.g., Infrastructure as a Service, Platform as a Service, and Software as a Service. However, no model-driven tooling exists to assist OCCI users in designing, editing, validating, generating, and managing OCCI artifacts (i.e., extensions that represent specific application domains and configurations that define the running systems). In this paper, we propose the first model-driven tool chain for OCCI called OCCIware Studio. This tool chain is based on a metamodel defining the static semantics for the OCCI standard in Ecore and OCL. OCCIware Studio provides OCCI users facilities for designing, editing, validating, generating, and managing OCCI artifacts. We detail the tooled process to define an OCCI extension. In addition, we show how the cloud user can leverage the generated tooling for this extension to create his own OCCI configurations and manage them in the cloud.We illustrate our paper with the OCCI infrastructure extension proposed to define OCCI-compliant compute, network, and storageresources

INDIGO-DataCloud: A data and computing platform to facilitate seamless access to e-infrastructures

This paper describes the achievements of the H2020 project INDIGO-DataCloud. The project has provided e-infrastructures with tools, applications and cloud framework enhancements to manage the demanding requirements of scientific communities, either locally or through enhanced interfaces. The middleware developed allows to federate hybrid resources, to easily write, port and run scientific applications to the cloud. In particular, we have extended existing PaaS (Platform as a Service) solutions, allowing public and private e-infrastructures, including those provided by EGI, EUDAT, and Helix Nebula, to integrate their existing services and make them available through AAI services compliant with GEANT interfederation policies, thus guaranteeing transparency and trust in the provisioning of such services. Our middleware facilitates the execution of applications using containers on Cloud and Grid based infrastructures, as well as on HPC clusters. Our developments are freely downloadable as open source components, and are already being integrated into many scientific applications

BioClimate: a Science Gateway for Climate Change and Biodiversity research in the EUBrazilCloudConnect project

[EN] Climate and biodiversity systems are closely linked across a wide range of scales. To better understand the mutual interaction between climate change and biodiversity there is a strong need for multidisciplinary skills, scientific tools, and access to a large variety of heterogeneous, often distributed, data sources. Related to that, the EUBrazilCloudConnect project provides a user-oriented research environment built on top of a federated cloud infrastructure across Europe and Brazil, to serve key needs in different scientific domains, which is validated through a set of use cases. Among them, the most data-centric one is focused on climate change and biodiversity research. As part of this use case, the BioClimate Science Gateway has been implemented to provide end-users transparent access to (i) a highly integrated user-friendly environment, (ii) a large variety of data sources, and (iii) different analytics & visualization tools to serve a large spectrum of users needs and requirements. This paper presents a complete overview of BioClimate and the related scientific environment, in particular its Science Gateway, delivered to the end-user community at the end of the project.This work was supported by the EU FP7 EUBrazilCloudConnect Project (Grant Agreement 614048), and CNPq/Brazil (Grant Agreement no 490115/2013-6).Fiore, S.; Elia, D.; Blanquer Espert, I.; Brasileiro, FV.; Nuzzo, A.; Nassisi, P.; Rufino, LAA.... (2019). BioClimate: a Science Gateway for Climate Change and Biodiversity research in the EUBrazilCloudConnect project. Future Generation Computer Systems. 94:895-909. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.future.2017.11.034S8959099

Model driven simulation of elastic OCCI cloud resources

International audienceDeploying a cloud configuration in a real cloud platform is mostly cost-and time-consuming, as large number of cloud resources have to be rent for the time needed to run the configuration. Thereafter, cloud simulation tools are used as a cheap alternative to test Cloud configuration. However, most of existing cloud simulation tools require extensive technical skills and does not support simulation of any kind of cloud resources. In this context, using a model-driven approach can be helpful as it allows developers to efficiently describe their needs at a high level of abstraction. To do, we propose, in this article, a Model-Driven Engineering (MDE) approach based on the OCCI (Open Cloud Computing Interface) standard metamodel and CloudSim toolkit. We firstly extend OCCI metamodel for supporting simulation of any kind of cloud resources. Afterward, to illustrate the extensibility of our approach, we enrich the proposed metamodel by new simulation capabilities. As proof of concept, we study the elasticity and pricing strategies of Amazon Web Services (AWS). This article benefits from OCCIware Studio to design an OCCI simulation extension and to provide a simulation designer for designing cloud configurations to be simulated. We detail the approach process from defining an OCCI simulation extension until the generation and the simulation of the OCCI cloud configurations. Finally, we validate the proposed approach by providing a realistic experimentation to study its usability, the resources coverage rate and the cost. The results is compared with the ones computed from AWS

Cloud service brokerage: a conceptual ontology-based service description framework

Cloud service brokerage has been identified as a key concern for future Cloud technology research and development. Integration, customization and aggregation are core functions of a Cloud service broker. The need to cater to horizontal and vertical integration in service description languages, horizontally between different providers and vertically across the different Cloud layers, has been well recognized. In this chapter, we propose a conceptual framework for a Cloud service broker in two parts: first, a reference architecture for Cloud service brokers; and second, a rich ontology-based template manipulation framework and operator calculus that describes the mediated and integrated Cloud services, facilitates manipulating their descriptions, and allows both horizontal and vertical dimensions to be covered. Structural aspects of that template will be identified, formalized in an ontology and aligned with the Cloud development and deployment process

A generic artifact-driven approach for provisioning, configuring, and managing infrastructure resources in the cloud

Provisioning, configuration, and management of infrastructure resources in the cloud is difficult due to diverse APIs offered by cloud providers. Because approaches for a common API are still in an early stage and may not be broadly accepted, individual artifacts can be used to interact with different providers. They require generic properties to describe the configuration of infrastructure resources and combine them with provider-specific information provided by the user. Such generic properties are determined in this thesis by looking at the infrastructure offerings of 14 different providers. The artifacts can be made available in public repositories similar to configuration management scripts originating in the DevOps community. However, trust in their good nature is a challenge because in contrast to configuration management scripts they are executed in a shared management environment. To control and restrict the actions they are performing in this shared environment, a method to confine their execution has been developed. The Linux security module Tomoyo has been chosen as a foundation for this. A policy associated with each artifact describes the artifact's permissions in detail. The artifacts are used in the context of the OASIS Topology and Orchestration Specifiction for Cloud Applications (TOSCA), an emerging standard supported by a number of industry partners. This standard allows to model a topology of resources to be provisioned at a provider. Each infrastructure resource, such as a virtual machine, gets an artifact assigned for provisioning purposes. Based on this standard, two simple tools as well as artifacts for four providers were developed. They show the viability of this artifact-driven approach

Blueprint model and language for engineering cloud applications

Abstract: The research presented in this thesis is positioned within the domain of engineering CSBAs. Its contribution is twofold: (1) a uniform specification language, called the Blueprint Specification Language (BSL), for specifying cloud services across several cloud vendors and (2) a set of associated techniques, called the Blueprint Manipulation Techniques (BMTs), for publishing, querying, and composing cloud service specifications with aim to support the flexible design and configuration of an CSBA.