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

Service broker for cloud service description language

Cloud Service Description Language (CSDL), initiative and discourse, is concentrated to deploy applications on various cloud platforms without modifying source-code. Semantic topology and orchestration of applications provides practical advantage for service providers with ability of interoperability, portability and unified interfaces. However, this has also resulted problems for consumers to identify the appropriate services spread over swarm platforms. The advantage, with common CSDL such as Topology and Orchestration Specification for Cloud Applications (TOSCA), becomes problematic for consumers. Service providers will have different technical and business details such as: discovery, pricing, licensing or composition depending upon deployed platform; therefore, selection of service becomes challenging and requires human effort. Service Broker design is presented for TOSCA framework only; however, the suggested scheme is generic and adaptable to accommodate similar standards of CSDL

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

Semantic Techniques for Multi-Cloud Applications Portability and Interoperability

The composition of Cloud Services to satisfy customer requirements is a complex task, owing to the huge number of services that arecurrentlyavailable. TheadventofBigDataandInternetofThings(IoT),whichrelyonCloudresourcesforbetterperformances and scalability, is pushing researchers to find new solutions to the Cloud Services composition problem. In this paper a semanticbased representation of Application Patterns and Cloud Services is presented, with an example of its use in a typical distributed application, which shows how the proposed approach can be successfully employed for the discovery and composition of Cloud Services.

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

Containerisation and the PaaS Cloud

Containerisation is widely discussed as a lightweight virtualisation solution. Apart from exhibiting benefits over traditional virtual machines in the cloud, containers are especially relevant for Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) clouds to manage and orchestrate applications through containers as an application packaging mechanism. We discuss the requirements that arise from having to facilitate applications through distributed multi-cloud platforms

Design and implementation of TOSCA Service Templates for provisioning and executing bone simulation in cloud environments

Recent years have shown an increasing trend to move applications and services into cloud infrastructures. Cloud-based applications typically consist of distributed components which are connected and communicate with each other. Automating the deployment and management of these components is one of the major challenges in IT world. The OASIS TOSCA standard provides a meta-model for describing the structure of composite cloud-based applications, which provides automation for deployment and management of these applications. TOSCA-based applications may be executed via the OpenTOSCA (a run-time environment for TOSCA-based applications) environment, which has been developed by the University of Stuttgart. Simulation applications deal with heterogeneous and huge data sources. Adequate data management and data provisioning for these applications are some of the most significant challenges for simulation applications. SIMPL is a framework which provides a generic approach for data management and data provisioning in simulation applications. SIMPL frees users to deal with any low-level details of data sources and corresponding data management operations. Both the TOSCA standard and the SIMPL framework are based on workflows. The first goal of this master's thesis is to combine the TOSCA standard with the SIMPL framework in order to enable the generic data provisioning and data management approach offered by SIMPL as an integral part of the TOSCA standard. A further and main part of this work is to design and implement TOSCA Service Templates for provisioning and executing bone simulations in cloud environments. Different variants of a TOSCA Service Template realizing a bone simulation in a cloud-native way have to be developed and implemented. In other words, a SaaS solution for PANDAS bone simulation is provided in the scope of this master's thesis with the help of TOSCA and SIMPL technologies