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

A Cloud-Based Architecture for Multimedia Conferencing Service Provisioning

Multimedia conferencing is the real-time exchange of multimedia content between multiple parties. It is the basis of several interactive multiuser applications, such as distance learning and multimedia multiplayer online games. The cloud-based provisioning of the conferencing services on which these applications rely on can have several benefits, including the easy provisioning of new applications, efficient use of resources, and elastic scalability. This paper proposes a holistic cloud-based architecture for conferencing service provisioning, which covers both the infrastructure and platform layers of the cloud. The proposed infrastructure layer offers conferencing substrates-as-a-service (e.g., dial-in signaling, video mixing, and audio mixing), instead of virtual machines or containers. The platform layer abstracts the details of the conferencing concepts and offers a high-level interface to simplify conference service provisioning for a wide range of service and application providers (experts versus non-experts). It also enables the on-the-fly scaling of the running conferences while guaranteeing the required quality of service, enables substrates composition to create new conferencing services, and eases the reuse of conferencing services in building new applications. The presented architecture is supported by a proof-of-concept prototype and performance measurements. The latter provides the analysis of resource allocation efficiency and response time, as well as the scalability of the system under suboptimal and over-provisioned conditions. It also provides recommendations for service providers regarding the best alternatives for provisioning their service

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

Integrating cloud service deployment automation with software-defined environments

The last decade has seen a deluge of technology and services related to cloud-computing. The idea of traditional IT infrastructure has been usurped by a rush to move all services to a cloud infrastructure and to implement them in a cloud-native way. A cloud infrastructure is unlike a conventional infrastructure in that, it is implemented as a Software-Defined Environment (SDE) which abstracts and virtualises the underlying physical resources. It manages physical resources and provides virtual resources that process, manage, store, create networks and provision services. But while the concept of a virtual data center as played out by an SDE seems ideal, the issues it brings in implementation are quite a few. For one, deployment and management of services on such a large scale is difficult. It is also subject to human efficiency and error. So, new levels of tracking and automation have to be explored in parallel to support and sustain the cloud-computing phenomenon. Several configuration management and orchestration tools have been developed over years, to fulfill the need of automated deployment and management. TOSCA is one of such that provides a specification which empowers this goal by using a metamodel. It defines implementation artifacts that encapsulate functionality of external services to use them during deployment. An open-source container called OpenTOSCA, is under development at the University of Stuttgart. This framework can process the TOSCA specification. In this thesis, OpenStack has been employed as the cloud infrastructure provider. To achieve our goal, an implementation artifact for the relevant OpenStack components has to be developed in concept and implementation. In order to create useful implementation artifacts an appropriate level of abstraction has to be introduced between the low-level OpenStack API and the services that the implementation artifact provides. Accordingly, a TOSCA artifact is designed and implemented as a web service and packaged in a container file, called CSAR. This file, when processed by the OpenTOSCA container, causes the automated provisioning of a server on OpenStack. To evaluate the nature of the implementation artifact, the web service is hosted on the local machine and tests are performed to check for correct implementation of service endpoints. The results of these invocations are later presented

An extensible application topology definition and annotation framework

This thesis introduces a framework for decision support during the design of applications for the cloud, or migration of existing applications to a cloud environment. For this purpose, a GENeralized Topology Language (GENTL) is introduced and mappings from existing languages to GENTL are provided. An annotation scheme for GENTL, which can capture annotations to topologies and topology elements is designed and instantiations for different annotation types are given. A framework implementing import functionalities for the topology languages Blueprint and TOSCA is presented. The framework enables the annotation of topologies with documentation annotations, references to external resources and incorporates a series of annotations which can be used to retrieve cost calculations from the external decision support system Nefolog

Development of TOSCA service templates for provisioning portable IT services

Provisioning cloud computing solutions is a tedious and long process, especially when configuring many components and not only offering the application but also the infrastructure. Today, an administrator has to upload, install and configure all the components of a software solution manually, which not only takes time and is prone to errors but also increases the onboarding costs at the cloud provider. Decreasing deployment times by the use of an automated system is favored. TOSCA provides a specification which allows the deployment and management of cloud services by providing a meta-model. With that it is possible to mitigate all problems in theory. OpenTOSCA is a framework called container, which can interpret the TOSCA specification and is used in this work to deploy an Enterprise Content Management stack on a cloud environment, testing the boundaries of its capabilities. After designing deployment models by the means of a domain specific modeling approach, an implementation is realized and compiled into a deployment file. This file is also called a container file and is processed by OpenTOSCA to initiate the deployment on the cloud environment, including the necessary middleware. The goal of this diploma thesis is to develop a TOSCA Service Template, that provides a topology model and automates the deployment of ECM core components. TOSCA Node Types for the middleware and application components have to be defined. To further help modeling the topology, a domain specific model (DSM) will be introduced by generically defining all components and their operations. That generic model will be used to realize the actual ECM stack components. The ECM stack is then deployed via OpenTOSCA and the execution is reviewed

Automatic Deployment of Services in the Cloud with Aeolus Blender

International audienceWe present Aeolus Blender (Blender in the following), a software product for the automatic deployment and configuration of complex service-based, distributed software systems in the " cloud ". By relying on a configuration optimiser and a deployment planner, Blender fully automates the deployment of real-life applications on OpenStack cloud deployments , by exploiting a knowledge base of software services provided by the Mandriva Armonic tool suite. The final deployment is guaranteed to satisfy not only user requirements and relevant software dependencies , but also to be optimal with respect to the number of used virtual machines

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