We are proud to announce our development version of a framework for controlling services as whole entities on top of IaaS Clouds.Claudia is a development version that is currently been reworked to solve some known issues, but we feel sharing its current status may be beneficial for both, the community and Claudia.Claudia’s current version is fully compliant to work on top of OpenNebula (v1.4) and get integrated with its drivers for Amazon or Eucalyptus.

Standard-based interfaces

Claudia exposes a set of very well defined interfaces for its operation, all of them REST-based. Claudia’s operations have been proposed for discussion at a prominent standardization body (DMTF), under the TCloud label. Through this interface, Claudia receives an OVF file describing the service in a holistic manner (not only virtual machines) including a set of extensions being under discussion in DMTF’s Open Cloud incubator. More details have been presented in a paper by Galán et al.TCloud is used as a top interface to interact with service providers and TCloud defines the payloads that other to-be standards, such as the OCCI, do not define. Thus, TCloud could be regarded as an OCCI-compliant product in which the payload uses OVF (OCCI just defines header schemas for navigating the Cloud model).

Advanced Scaling Features

Claudia offers uniquely advanced scaling customization procedures. Claudia lets service providers define their own scaling rules by including highly abstract metrics that are currently unsupported by state of the art IaaS Clouds.  More details can be found in a related paper by Rodero-Merino et al. in Future Generation Computer Systems.

Short Term Features

New features will soon be added in order to increase its current potential and usability. As of today, Claudia’s service lifecycle control is based on a static mechanism that does not allow service providers to fully control the lifecycle and behavior of their whole services at runtime. Claudia will soon release an advanced lifecycle manager that helps service providers to control their service’s runtime behavior and change it on-the-fly. Also, Amazon drivers and federation modules to Amazon and ElasticHosts will be released after the summer so as to avoid depending on a single vendor (OpenNebula’s is the only “driver” implemented so far). Plainly speaking, Claudia will let you place parts of your service in an IaaS Cloud and other components in other IaaS Cloud in a seamless manner.Also, a dashboard for creating the OVF files used to describe the service is on the roadmap to enhance Claudia’s usability.

In a very recent post, Craig Balding, founder of cloudsecurity.org, highlights the fact that we are all concern about the security implications derived from the bunch of new and old technologies labelled as Clouds.“The problem is that there are many donkeys, and even more tails. Worse, we’re all trying to stick different tails on the same donkeys”, he claims.Indeed, he proposes security experts to join the A6 group in order to start building a common interface that allows providers to automate the Audit, Assertion, Assessment, and Assurance of their environments and allow authorized consumers of their services  to do likewise via an open, extensible and secure API across SaaS, PaaS, and IaaS offerings.We believe this kind of efforts are very valuable and need strong industrial and academic support in order to become something close to a success. Success here does not come in the form of a widely used standard, but in the sense that the Cloud does not really include any disruptive technology to be afraid of with regards to its security. It is the usage we make of the combination of already existent technologies that makes the difference.From this website we will be following the progresses and contributing our two cents for such a needed API to become a reality.