High-level Description of Cloud Applications using TOSCA

Public sector organizations and SMEs are increasingly considering using cloud services in their everyday activities. At the one hand on-demand access to cloud services in a flexible and elastic way could result in significant cost savings due to more efficient and convenient utilization. Further it can also replace large investment costs with long-term operational costs. On the other hand, the take up of cloud computing by the public sector and Small- and Medium-size Enterprises (SME) is still relatively low due to limited application-level flexibility and shortages in cloud specific skills. To meet these requirements a generic framework is needed to support public sector organizations and SMEs to run large variety of applications in the cloud in a cost effective, flexible and seamless way. To address these challenges the European funded COLA (Cloud Orchestration at the Level of Application) [1] project is designing and developing a modular architecture called MiCADO (Microservices-based Cloud Application-level Dynamic Orchestrator) [2]. It provides optimized deployment and run-time orchestration for cloud applications. MiCADO can manage applications considering their specific deployment, execution, scalability and security requirements. To further address this challenge COLA uses TOSCA (Topology and Orchestration Specification for Cloud Applications [3] to describe applications to be executed in the cloud. Application developers can create so called Application Description Templates (ADT) to specify and submit their applications to the cloud through MiCADO. ADTs define two key properties of applications: topologies and policies. There are two approaches to define ADTs: using either command-line interfaces or graphical user interfaces. Command-line interface requires deep knowledge of the TOSCA specification and good YAML knowledge. Since application developers in the public sector organizations and at SMEs may not have this knowledge COLA’s priority is providing a GUI–based environment to enable application developers to describe their applications. The project investigated several GUI-based TOSCA development environments such as, OpenTOSCA Winery [4] and Alien 4 Cloud [5]. Winery generates XML-based specification of application topologies. The current Winery version automatically translates the XML-based TOSCA specifications into YAML to make them compatible with the latest TOSCA specification. Since each translation has its own limitations, some TOSCA features that are required in COLA, are lost in translation. The other limitation of Winery is that it does not support the definition of TOSCA policy specifications. Fig. 1 presents a simple topology template developed in Winery. Although Alien 4 Cloud supports the definition of cloud applications through a GUI environment, the generated description is not fully TOSCA compliant and cannot be parsed with most widely used TOSCA parsers. Considering the above listed limitations, COLA is developing a GUI-based environment to support application specification in TOSCA YAML v1.0. The extra feature of this environment will be a wide range support for policy specification, for example enabling development of deployment, execution, scalability and security policies

MiCADO – Towards a Microservice-based Cloud Application-level Dynamic Orchestrator

In order to satisfy end-user requirements, many scientific and commercial applications require access to dynamically adjustable infrastructure resources. Cloud computing has the potential to provide these dynamic capabilities. However, utilising these capabilities from application code is not trivial and requires application developers to understand low-level technical details of clouds. This paper investigates how a generic framework can be developed that supports the dynamic orchestration of cloud applications both at deployment and at run-time. The advantages and challenges of designing such framework based on microservices is analysed, and a generic framework, called MiCADO – (Microservices-based Cloud Application-level Dynamic Orchestrator) is proposed. A first prototype implementation of MiCADO to support data intensive commercial web applications is also presented

Enabling modular design of an application-level auto-scaling and orchestration framework using tosca-based application description templates

This paper presents a novel approach to writing TOSCA templates for application reusability and portability in a modular auto-scaling and orchestration framework (MiCADO). The approach defines cloud resources as well as application containers in a flexible and generic way, and allows for those definitions to be extended with specific properties related to a desired container orchestrator chosen at deployment time. The approach is demonstrated in a proof-of-concept where only a minor change was required to a previously used application template in order to achieve the successful deployment and lifecycle management of the popular web authoring tool Wordpress on a new realization of the MiCADO framework featuring a different container orchestrator

Flexible Deployment of Social Media Analysis Tools, Flexible, Policy-Oriented and Multi-Cloud deployment of Social Media Analysis Tools in the COLA Project

The relationship between companies and customers and among public authorities and citizens has changed dramatically with the widespread utilisation of the Internet and Social Networks. To help governments to keep abreast of these changes, Inycom has developed Eccobuzz and Magician, a set of web applications for Social Media data mining. The unpredictable load of these applications requires flexible user-defined policies and automated scalability during deployment and execution time. Even more importantly, privacy norms require that data is restricted to certain physical locations. This paper explains how such applications are described with Application Description Templates (ADTs). ADTs define complex topology descriptions and various deployment, scalability and security policies, and how these templates are used by a submitter that translates this generic information into executable format for submission to the reference framework of the COLA European projec

Describing and Processing Topology and Quality of Service Parameters of Applications in the Cloud

Typical cloud applications require high-level policy driven orchestration to achieve efficient resource utilisation and robust security to support different types of users and user scenarios. However, the efficient and secure utilisation of cloud resources to run applications is not trivial. Although there have been several efforts to support the coordinated deployment, and to a smaller extent the run-time orchestration of applications in the Cloud, no comprehensive solution has emerged until now that successfully leverages applications in an efficient, secure and seamless way. One of the major challenges is how to specify and manage Quality of Service (QoS) properties governing cloud applications. The solution to address these challenges could be a generic and pluggable framework that supports the optimal and secure deployment and run-time orchestration of applications in the Cloud. A specific aspect of such a cloud orchestration framework is the need to describe complex applications incorporating several services. These application descriptions must specify both the structure of the application and its QoS parameters, such as desired performance, economic viability and security. This paper proposes a cloud technology agnostic approach to application descriptions based on existing standards and describes how these application descriptions can be processed to manage applications in the Cloud

Towards a Deadline-Based Simulation Experimentation Framework Using Micro-Services Auto-Scaling Approach

There is growing number of research efforts in developing auto-scaling algorithms and tools for cloud resources. Traditional performance metrics such as CPU, memory and bandwidth usage for scaling up or down resources are not sufficient for all applications. For example, modeling and simulation experimentation is usually expected to yield results within a specific timeframe. In order to achieve this, often the quality of experiments is compromised either by restricting the parameter space to be explored or by limiting the number of replications required to give statistical confidence. In this paper, we present early stages of a deadline-based simulation experimentation framework using a micro-services auto-scaling approach. A case study of an agent-based simulation of a population physical activity behavior is used to demonstrate our framework

Automated Scalability of Cloud Services and Jobs

Many scientific and commercial applications require access to computation, data or networking resources based on dynamically changing requirements. Users and providers both require these applications or services to dynamically adjust to fluctuations in demand and serve end-users at required quality of service (performance, reliability, security, etc.) and at optimized cost. This may require resources of these applications or services to automatically scale up or down. The European funded COLA (Cloud Orchestration at the Level of Application) project aims to design and develop a generic framework that supports automated scalability of a large variety of applications. Learning from previous similar efforts and with the aim of reusing existing open source technologies wherever possible, COLA elaborated a modular architecture called MiCADO (Microservices-based Cloud Application-level Dynamic Orchestrator) [1] that provides optimized deployment and run-time orchestration for cloud applications. MiCADO is built from well-defined building blocks implemented as microservices. This modular design supports various implementations where components can be replaced relatively easily with alternative technologies. The generic, technology independent architecture diagram of MiCADO is represented in Figure 1. Building blocks, both on the MiCADO Master and also on the MiCADO Worker Nodes are implemented as microservices. The current implementation uses widely applied technologies, such as Docker Swarm as Container Orchestrator [2], Occopus as Cloud Orchestrator [3], and Prometheus [4] as the Monitoring System. The user facing interface of MiCADO is a TOSCA (Topology and Orchestration Specification for Cloud Applications, an OASIS standard) [5] based description of the desired topology and its associated scalability and security policies. This interface can then be embedded to existing GUIs, custom web interfaces or science gateways. The first prototype implementations of MiCADO show promising results on various application types. The two main targeted application categories are cloud-based services where scalability is achieved by scaling up or down the number of containers and virtual machines based on load, performance and cost, and the execution of a large number of (typically parameter sweep style) jobs where a certain number of these jobs need to be executed by a set deadline. Direct involvement of industry partners assures that the results of COLA are prototyped on real application scenarios. Three near production quality demonstrators and twenty further proof of concept case studies are being implemented using MiCADO and demonstrating its applicability in case of both service and job type scalability. Some of the applications prototyped are directly related to services utilized in science gateways, such as the Data Avenue service of WS-PGRADE [6]

The effects of rearing in individual crates on subsequent social behaviour of veal calves

International audienc

The Effects of Rearing in Individual Crates on Subsequent Social-Behavior of Veal Calves

WOS:A1994PY39000005International audienceThe aim of this study was to determine the effects of rearing in individual crates on the subsequent social behaviour of calves. The calves (n = 32) were divided into groups of eight animals reared in crates until 19 weeks of age, eight reared in crates until 14 weeks of age and grouped together thereafter and 16 reared always in groups, which were re-allotted at 14 weeks of age. The social encounters were recorded on the days the calves were grouped at 14 weeks (intra-treatment mixing) and at 19 weeks, when created calves were mixed with those that had always been in groups (inter-treatment mixing). The social behaviour was then observed 1, 5 and 12 days thereafter. The data were analysed with Kruskal-Wallis and Mann-Whitney tests. After mixing at 14 weeks, more agonistic encounters and fewer non-agonistic encounters were observed in groups of previously crated calves than in groups of calves that had always been in groups (butts per calf per 2 h period, 6.6 vs. 1.8, P \textless 0.01; licks per calf per 2 h period, 3.9 vs. 7.5, P \textless 0.05). After mixing at 19 weeks, there were only slight differences between calves. The calves that had always been in groups achieved hierarchical ranks higher than crated calves in 14 out of 16 occurrences with calves crated until 19 weeks of age but in only 5 out of 16 occurrences with those crated until 14 weeks of age. It is concluded that the reduction of social contacts has short-term effects on the social behaviour of calves and that these effects can be reversed by mixing calves with similar social experience