Interoperability standards for cloud architecture

Enabling cloud infrastructures to evolve into a transparent platform raises interoperability issues. Interoperability requires standard data models and communication technologies compatible with the existing Internet infrastructure. To reduce vendor lock-in situations, cloud computing must implement common 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. Relevant modelling standards and integration solutions shall be analysed in the context of clouds

APMEC: An Automated Provisioning Framework for Multi-access Edge Computing

Novel use cases and verticals such as connected cars and human-robot cooperation in the areas of 5G and Tactile Internet can significantly benefit from the flexibility and reduced latency provided by Network Function Virtualization (NFV) and Multi-Access Edge Computing (MEC). Existing frameworks managing and orchestrating MEC and NFV are either tightly coupled or completely separated. The former design is inflexible and increases the complexity of one framework. Whereas, the latter leads to inefficient use of computation resources because information are not shared. We introduce APMEC, a dedicated framework for MEC while enabling the collaboration with the management and orchestration (MANO) frameworks for NFV. The new design allows to reuse allocated network services, thus maximizing resource utilization. Measurement results have shown that APMEC can allocate up to 60% more number of network services. Being developed on top of OpenStack, APMEC is an open source project, available for collaboration and facilitating further research activities

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

Towards Automated and Optimized Security Orchestration in Cloud SLA

In cloud computing, providers pool their resources and make them available to customers. Next-generation computer scientists are flocking to the cutting-edge field of cloud computing for their research and exploration of uncharted territory. There are still several barriers that cloud service providers must overcome in order to provide cloud services in accordance with service level agreements. Each cloud service provider aspires to achieve maximum performance as per Service Level Agreements (SLAs), and this is especially true when it comes to the delivery of services. A cloud service level agreement (SLA) guarantees that cloud service providers will satisfy the needs of large businesses and offer their clients with a specified list of services. The authors offer a web service level agreement–inspired approach for cloud service agreements. We adopt patterns and antipatterns to symbolize the best and worst practices of OCCI (Open Cloud Computing Interface Standard), REST (Representational State Transfer), and TOSCA (Topology and Orchestration Specification for Cloud Applications) with DevOps solutions, all of which API developers should bear in mind when designing APIs. When using this method, everything pertaining to the cloud service, from creation to deployment to measurement to evaluation to management to termination, may be handled mechanically. When distributing resources to cloud apps, our system takes into account the likelihood of SLA breaches and responds by providing more resources if necessary. We say that for optimal performance, our suggested solution should be used in a private cloud computing setting. As more and more people rely on cloud computing for their day-to-day workloads, there has been a corresponding rise in the need for efficient orchestration and management strategies that foster interoperability

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

CYCLONE Unified Deployment and Management of Federated, Multi-Cloud Applications

Various Cloud layers have to work in concert in order to manage and deploy complex multi-cloud applications, executing sophisticated workflows for Cloud resource deployment, activation, adjustment, interaction, and monitoring. While there are ample solutions for managing individual Cloud aspects (e.g. network controllers, deployment tools, and application security software), there are no well-integrated suites for managing an entire multi cloud environment with multiple providers and deployment models. This paper presents the CYCLONE architecture that integrates a number of existing solutions to create an open, unified, holistic Cloud management platform for multi-cloud applications, tailored to the needs of research organizations and SMEs. It discusses major challenges in providing a network and security infrastructure for the Intercloud and concludes with the demonstration how the architecture is implemented in a real life bioinformatics use case

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