Technical Report on Deploying a highly secured OpenStack Cloud Infrastructure using BradStack as a Case Study

Cloud computing has emerged as a popular paradigm and an attractive model for providing a reliable distributed computing model.it is increasing attracting huge attention both in academic research and industrial initiatives. Cloud deployments are paramount for institution and organizations of all scales. The availability of a flexible, free open source cloud platform designed with no propriety software and the ability of its integration with legacy systems and third-party applications are fundamental. Open stack is a free and opensource software released under the terms of Apache license with a fragmented and distributed architecture making it highly flexible. This project was initiated and aimed at designing a secured cloud infrastructure called BradStack, which is built on OpenStack in the Computing Laboratory at the University of Bradford. In this report, we present and discuss the steps required in deploying a secured BradStack Multi-node cloud infrastructure and conducting Penetration testing on OpenStack Services to validate the effectiveness of the security controls on the BradStack platform. This report serves as a practical guideline, focusing on security and practical infrastructure related issues. It also serves as a reference for institutions looking at the possibilities of implementing a secured cloud solution.Comment: 38 pages, 19 figures

Survey on cloud based testing tools

Cloud computing has been adopted by many business organizations due to its simplicity and innovative technology. It has changed the way software used to be developed and delivered to customers. Every company aims to develop high quality software, with reduced cost and complexity. Cloud computing provides a platform for software testing where any application can be tested in cloud environment. The main goal of this thesis was to provide an understanding about cloud testing methodologies and explore cloud service providers offering various testing tools and technologies for different types of testing (functional and non-functional testing). This thesis incorporates description about cloud computing, its benefits, and how it has been helping the organizations with different service models. Taking cloud computing as the base of understanding, cloud testing methodologies and its architecture are explained. In addition, the cloud service providers along with the tools they provide for testing were explored and some of their features were discussed. The pros and cons were analysed in order to find whether cloud-based testing tools were suitable for the organizational environment and its differences were compared with the traditional approach of testing. The research for this thesis was carried out via companies (service providers) websites, blogs, articles, journals and other papers. Communication mediums such as chat, email and phone were also used for the research on tools. The study indicates that cloud testing is often used as a performance testing and is mostly implemented using software as a service model. In addition, organizations can be benefited by embracing cloud testing methodologies, if they know how to exploit it properly. The results of this study suggest that though cloud testing is attracting more businesses with its promise of minimal maintenance and low costs, it can sometimes be risky. Cloud testing provides more choices for the organizations regarding how to run the infrastructures, save costs and time and delegate liabilities to third-party providers. On the other hand, it can also be challenging in terms of security, performance and other issues. This thesis also analyses things to be considered before moving to the cloud system

Data-Driven Decisions and Actions in Today’s Software Development

Today’s software development is all about data: data about the software product itself, about the process and its different stages, about the customers and markets, about the development, the testing, the integration, the deployment, or the runtime aspects in the cloud. We use static and dynamic data of various kinds and quantities to analyze market feedback, feature impact, code quality, architectural design alternatives, or effects of performance optimizations. Development environments are no longer limited to IDEs in a desktop application or the like but span the Internet using live programming environments such as Cloud9 or large-volume repositories such as BitBucket, GitHub, GitLab, or StackOverflow. Software development has become “live” in the cloud, be it the coding, the testing, or the experimentation with different product options on the Internet. The inherent complexity puts a further burden on developers, since they need to stay alert when constantly switching between tasks in different phases. Research has been analyzing the development process, its data and stakeholders, for decades and is working on various tools that can help developers in their daily tasks to improve the quality of their work and their productivity. In this chapter, we critically reflect on the challenges faced by developers in a typical release cycle, identify inherent problems of the individual phases, and present the current state of the research that can help overcome these issues

Considerations for introducing a cloud service in health informatics: user experience monitoring of information systems

This thesis will show concrete examples about how user experience monitoring will improve security of health information systems, patient safety, efficiency, and ease of use. This thesis will prove how the current EMR systems that are stand alone in nature lack the ability of advanced error monitoring capabilities. As part of this research, I will demonstrate with detailed interviews and data collection surveys how automated user monitoring systems improve data record accuracy consistently. Key terminology to Electronic Medical Records (EMR’s) and the usability of cloud computing software solutions will be defined. EMR’s are the primary software used in hospitals for charting patient information and this research focuses on the summarization of key information to the history of healthcare technologies and their functionalities. Usability testing, cloud computing, and how security and trust are affecting the adoption of cloud-based services will also be discussed in more detail. Along with the importance of market research, how to create buyer personas, and what drives their need to buy. The study was conducted in collaboration with Adusso Ltd. in Helsinki, Finland to gain better understanding about what motivates hospital IT departments to buy and the main issues with EMR systems. In collaboration with Adusso we investigated a use case example of their existing customer Apotti leveraging the user error reduction and cost saving benefits they experienced after deploying Adusso’s UX2play system. We sought answers to these topics using semi-structured interviews and analyzing our customer profiles. We found that UI layout, interoperability, and the number of clicks that nurses spend in the EMR are major issues that most EMR systems have. This implies that companies using EMR’s should implement user monitoring to pinpoint the issues they do have so that they can be fixed and the work of physicians and clinicians can be improved

Cloud based testing of business applications and web services

This paper deals with testing of applications based on the principles of cloud computing. It is aimed to describe options of testing business software in clouds (cloud testing). It identifies the needs for cloud testing tools including multi-layer testing; service level agreement (SLA) based testing, large scale simulation, and on-demand test environment. In a cloud-based model, ICT services are distributed and accessed over networks such as intranet or internet, which offer large data centers deliver on demand, resources as a service, eliminating the need for investments in specific hardware, software, or on data center infrastructure. Businesses can apply those new technologies in the contest of intellectual capital management to lower the cost and increase competitiveness and also earnings. Based on comparison of the testing tools and techniques, the paper further investigates future trend of cloud based testing tools research and development. It is also important to say that this comparison and classification of testing tools describes a new area and it has not yet been done

Report from GI-Dagstuhl Seminar 16394: Software Performance Engineering in the DevOps World

This report documents the program and the outcomes of GI-Dagstuhl Seminar 16394 "Software Performance Engineering in the DevOps World". The seminar addressed the problem of performance-aware DevOps. Both, DevOps and performance engineering have been growing trends over the past one to two years, in no small part due to the rise in importance of identifying performance anomalies in the operations (Ops) of cloud and big data systems and feeding these back to the development (Dev). However, so far, the research community has treated software engineering, performance engineering, and cloud computing mostly as individual research areas. We aimed to identify cross-community collaboration, and to set the path for long-lasting collaborations towards performance-aware DevOps. The main goal of the seminar was to bring together young researchers (PhD students in a later stage of their PhD, as well as PostDocs or Junior Professors) in the areas of (i) software engineering, (ii) performance engineering, and (iii) cloud computing and big data to present their current research projects, to exchange experience and expertise, to discuss research challenges, and to develop ideas for future collaborations