Towards a contextualization solution for cloud platform services

We propose a cloud contextualization mechanism which operates in two stages, contextualization of VM images prior to service deployment (PaaS level) and self-contextualization of VM instances created from the image (IaaS level). The contextualization tools are implemented as part of the OPTIMIS Toolkit, a set of software components for simplified management of cloud services and infrastructures. We present the architecture of our contextualization tools and the feasibility of our contextualization mechanism is demonstrated in a three-tier web application scenario. Preliminary performance results suggest acceptable performance and scalability of our prototype

Cloud-like Management of Grid Sites 1.0 Software

This document presents the features implemented for the automatic deployment and dynamic provision of grid services, and for the scalable cloud-like management of grid site resources. These features, developed largely in Work Package 6 (WP6) are integrated into the StratusLab Toolkit by Work Package 4 (WP4). They involve cloud-like APIs, a service definition language, contextualization, scalable cloud frameworks, monitoring and accounting solutions. Some functionalities developed include TCloud and OCCI implementations, a library to process OVF, the Claudia framework and integration with Ganglia monitoring information

Dynamic management of virtual infrastructures

The final publication is available at Springer via http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s10723-014-9296-5Cloud infrastructures are becoming an appropriate solution to address the computational needs of scientific applications. However, the use of public or on-premises Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) clouds requires users to have non-trivial system administration skills. Resource provisioning systems provide facilities to choose the most suitable Virtual Machine Images (VMI) and basic configuration of multiple instances and subnetworks. Other tasks such as the configuration of cluster services, computational frameworks or specific applications are not trivial on the cloud, and normally users have to manually select the VMI that best fits, including undesired additional services and software packages. This paper presents a set of components that ease the access and the usability of IaaS clouds by automating the VMI selection, deployment, configuration, software installation, monitoring and update of Virtual Appliances. It supports APIs from a large number of virtual platforms, making user applications cloud-agnostic. In addition it integrates a contextualization system to enable the installation and configuration of all the user required applications providing the user with a fully functional infrastructure. Therefore, golden VMIs and configuration recipes can be easily reused across different deployments. Moreover, the contextualization agent included in the framework supports horizontal (increase/decrease the number of resources) and vertical (increase/decrease resources within a running Virtual Machine) by properly reconfiguring the software installed, considering the configuration of the multiple resources running. This paves the way for automatic virtual infrastructure deployment, customization and elastic modification at runtime for IaaS clouds.The authors would like to thank to thank the financial support received from the Ministerio de Economia y Competitividad for the project CodeCloud (TIN2010-17804).Caballer Fernández, M.; Blanquer Espert, I.; Moltó, G.; Alfonso Laguna, CD. (2015). Dynamic management of virtual infrastructures. Journal of Grid Computing. 13(1):53-70. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10723-014-9296-5S5370131de Alfonso, C., Caballer, M., Alvarruiz, F., Molto, G., Hernández, V.: Infrastructure deployment over the cloud. In: 2011 IEEE 3rd International Conference on Cloud Computing Technology and Science, pp. 517–521. IEEE. (2011). doi: 10.1109/CloudCom.2011.77Alvarruiz, F., De Alfonso, C., Caballer, M., Hernández, V.: An energy manager for high performance computer clusters. 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Parallel Process. 6081, 20 (2010)Buyya, R., Yeo, C.S., Venugopal, S., Broberg, J., Brandic, I.: Cloud computing and emerging IT platforms: Vision, hype, and reality for delivering computing as the 5th utility. Futur. Gener. Comput. Syst. 25(6), 599–616 (2009). doi: 10.1016/j.future.2008.12.001Caballer, M., De Alfonso, C., Alvarruiz, F., Moltó, G.: EC3: elastic cloud computing cluster. J. Comput. Syst. Sci. (2013). doi: 10.1016/j.jcss.2013.06.005Caballer, M., García, A., Moltó, G., de Alfonso, C.: Towards SLA-driven management of cloud infrastructures to elastically execute scientific applications. In: 6th Iberian Grid Infrastructure Conference (IberGrid), pp. 207–218 (2012)Carrión, J.V., Moltó, G., De Alfonso, C., Caballer, M., Hernández, V.: A generic catalog and repository service for virtual machine images. In: 2nd International ICST Conference on Cloud Computing CloudComp 2010 (2010)Cuomo, A., Modica, G., Distefano, S., Puliafito, A., Rak, M., Tomarchio, O., Venticinque, S., Villano, U.: An SLA-based broker for cloud infrastructures. J. Grid Comput 11(1), 1–25 (2012). doi: 10.1007/s10723-012-9241-4DeHaan, M.: Ansible. http://ansible.cc/ (2013)Distributed Management Task Force, Inc: Open Virtualization Format (OVF) (2010). http://dmtf.org/sites/default/files/standards/documents/DSP0243_1.1.0.pdfDistributed Management Task Force, Inc: Cloud Infrastructure Management Interface (CIMI) Model and REST Interface over HTTP Specification (2012). http://dmtf.org/sites/default/files/standards/documents/DSP0263_1.0.1.pdfEGI.eu: Seeking new horizons: EGI’s role for 2020. Tech. rep. (2012). https://documents.egi.eu/public/RetrieveFile?docid=1098&version=4&filename=EGI-1098-D230-final.pdfElmroth, E., Tordsson, J., Hernández, F.: Self-management challenges for multi-cloud architectures. 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In: Achieving Federated and SelfManageable Cloud Infrastructures Theory and Practice, pp. 18–35 (2012). doi: 10.4018/978-1-4666-1631-8.ch002Kertesz, A., Kecskemeti, G., Oriol, M., Kotcauer, P., Acs, S., Rodríguez, M., Mercè, O., Marosi, A.C., Marco, J., Franch, X.: Enhancing federated cloud management with an integrated service monitoring approach. J. Grid Comput. 11(4), 699–720 (2013). doi: 10.1007/s10723-013-9269-0Loutas, N., Kamateri, E., Bosi, F., Tarabanis, K.: Cloud computing interoperability: the state of play. 2011 IEEE 3rd International Conference on Cloud Computing Technology and Science, pp. 752–757 (2011). doi: 10.1109/CloudCom.2011.116Marshall, P., Keahey, K., Freeman, T.: Elastic site: using clouds to elastically extend site resources. In: Proceedings of the 2010 IEEE/ACM 10th International Conference on Cluster, Cloud and Grid Computing, CCGRID ’10, pp. 43–52. 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Grid Comput. (2013). doi: 10.1007/s10723-013-9285-

A collaborative citizen science platform for real-time volunteer computing and games

Volunteer computing (VC) or distributed computing projects are common in the citizen cyberscience (CCS) community and present extensive opportunities for scientists to make use of computing power donated by volunteers to undertake large-scale scientific computing tasks. Volunteer computing is generally a non-interactive process for those contributing computing resources to a project whereas volunteer thinking (VT) or distributed thinking, which allows volunteers to participate interactively in citizen cyberscience projects to solve human computation tasks. In this paper we describe the integration of three tools, the Virtual Atom Smasher (VAS) game developed by CERN, LiveQ, a job distribution middleware, and CitizenGrid, an online platform for hosting and providing computation to CCS projects. This integration demonstrates the combining of volunteer computing and volunteer thinking to help address the scientific and educational goals of games like VAS. The paper introduces the three tools and provides details of the integration process along with further potential usage scenarios for the resulting platform.Comment: 12 pages, 13 figure

Eco‐Holonic 4.0 Circular Business Model to Conceptualize Sustainable Value Chain Towards Digital Transition

The purpose of this paper is to conceptualize a circular business model based on an Eco-Holonic Architecture, through the integration of circular economy and holonic principles. A conceptual model is developed to manage the complexity of integrating circular economy principles, digital transformation, and tools and frameworks for sustainability into business models. The proposed architecture is multilevel and multiscale in order to achieve the instantiation of the sustainable value chain in any territory. The architecture promotes the incorporation of circular economy and holonic principles into new circular business models. This integrated perspective of business model can support the design and upgrade of the manufacturing companies in their respective industrial sectors. The conceptual model proposed is based on activity theory that considers the interactions between technical and social systems and allows the mitigation of the metabolic rift that exists between natural and social metabolism. This study contributes to the existing literature on circular economy, circular business models and activity theory by considering holonic paradigm concerns, which have not been explored yet. This research also offers a unique holonic architecture of circular business model by considering different levels, relationships, dynamism and contextualization (territory) aspects

Quarterly Report (QR2)

In the second quarter, the project has successfully created the first public release of the StratusLab cloud distribution. To complement the release, the project participants have provided user support, deployed a reference infrastructure for outside users, and increased awareness of the release and the project. High-level features, including advanced service management features, have been defined and will be progressively added to the series of public releases leading to the v1.0 release due at the end of the first year