Using Open Standards for Interoperability - Issues, Solutions, and Challenges facing Cloud Computing

Virtualization offers several benefits for optimal resource utilization over traditional non-virtualized server farms. With improvements in internetworking technologies and increase in network bandwidth speeds, a new era of computing has been ushered in, that of grids and clouds. With several commercial cloud providers coming up, each with their own APIs, application description formats, and varying support for SLAs, vendor lock-in has become a serious issue for end users. This article attempts to describe the problem, issues, possible solutions and challenges in achieving cloud interoperability. These issues will be analyzed in the ambit of the European project Contrail that is trying to adopt open standards with available virtualization solutions to enhance users' trust in the clouds by attempting to prevent vendor lock-ins, supporting and enforcing SLAs together with adequate data protection for sensitive data

Multi-Cloud Portable Application Deployment with VEP

Leveraging the plethora of available Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) solutions proves to be a hard task for users who should face the complexity of dealing with heterogeneous systems, either in terms of resources or APIs. Application portability is the mean to reduce the burden of adapting applications for specific IaaS types and escape po-tential vendor lock-in. The Virtual Execution Platform (VEP) is a cloud middleware software that interfaces multiple IaaS clouds and presents end-users with an interface facilitating deployment and life cycle man-agement of distributed applications made up of several inter-networked virtual machines. This paper presents the design of VEP and experi-mental results that evaluate its scalability in deploying applications on OpenNebula and OpenStack clouds

An architecture for self-managing microservices

Running applications in the cloud efficiently requires much more than deploying software in virtual machines. Cloud applications have to be continuously managed: 1) to adjust their resources to the incoming load and 2) to face transient failures replicating and restarting components to provide resiliency on unreliable infrastructure. Continuous management monitors application and infrastructural metrics to provide automated and responsive reactions to failures (health management) and changing environmental conditions (autoscaling) minimizing human intervention. In the current practice, management functionalities are provided as infrastructural or third party services. In both cases they are external to the application deployment. We claim that this approach has intrinsic limits, namely that separating management functionalities from the application prevents them from naturally scaling with the application and requires additional management code and human intervention. Moreover, using infrastructure provider services for management functionalities results in vendor lock-in effectively preventing cloud applications to adapt and run on the most effective cloud for the job. In this position paper we propose a novel architecture that enables scalable and resilient self-management of microservices applications on cloud

Managing OVF applications under SLA constraints on Contrail Virtual Execution Platform

International audienceThe move of users and organizations to Cloud computing will become possible when they will be able to exploit their own applications, applications and services provided by cloud providers as well as applications from third party providers in a trustful way on different cloud infrastructures. To reach this goal, standard application formats must be enabled on the cloud to avoid vendor-lockin, and guarantees concerning protection, performance and security supported. This article describes the Contrail VEP component developed by the Contrail project. The VEP component is in charge of managing the whole life cycle of OVF distributed applications under Service Level Agreement rules on different infrastructure providers

A Case for CDN-as-a-Service in the Cloud: A Mobile Cloud Networking Argument

Content Distribution Networks are mandatory components of modern web architectures, with plenty of vendors offering their services. Despite its maturity, new paradigms and architecture models are still being developed in this area. Cloud Computing, on the other hand, is a more recent concept which has expanded extremely quickly, with new services being regularly added to cloud management software suites such as OpenStack. The main contribution of this paper is the architecture and the development of an open source CDN that can be provisioned in an on-demand, pay-as-you-go model thereby enabling the CDN as a Service paradigm. We describe our experience with integration of CDNaaS framework in a cloud environment, as a service for enterprise users. We emphasize the flexibility and elasticity of such a model, with each CDN instance being delivered on-demand and associated to personalized caching policies as well as an optimized choice of Points of Presence based on exact requirements of an enterprise customer. Our development is based on the framework developed in the Mobile Cloud Networking EU FP7 project, which offers its enterprise users a common framework to instantiate and control services. CDNaaS is one of the core support components in this project as is tasked to deliver different type of multimedia content to several thousands of users geographically distributed. It integrates seamlessly in the MCN service life-cycle and as such enjoys all benefits of a common design environment, allowing for an improved interoperability with the rest of the services within the MCN ecosystem