Telefónica I+D is proud to announce the first release of its OCCI Java implementation.

After UCM’s efforts to provide the first fully-compliant OCCI server attached to OpenNebula, we release here a second OCCI implementation (Java REST client + server).

This is the result of privately-funded efforts as well as  FP7 European Research projects  (co-funded by Telefónica and the European Commission) such as RESERVOIR.

Affero GPL has been the chosen license for this OCCI implementation. Comments, critique and feedback are most welcome through our support pages.

Thanks a lot!!

Juan José Hierro, CTO on Software Technologies, presented Telefónica’s vision on Cloud Technologies at the Grids, Clouds and Service Infrastructures” workshop organized by ETSI and OGF-Europe at Sophia Antipolis on last 2-3 December 2009.

In his speech, Juan  José Hierro presented the vision on the evolution of cloud technologies focused in three axis:

•  ICT infrastructure provisioning for hosted applications. First available Cloud Services  such as Amazon or Google already allow easy auto-provisioning of ICT resources for application developers in a pay-per-use model. But It still remains a long way until application providers will not have to have specialized knowledge on execution environments administration or until convergent computing and networking that will help to commit desired SLAs.
• Transformation of Cloud into an ecosystem for developing business opportunities. Clouds tend to add a “marketplace” that will allow customers to search, select and consume applications, supporting a number of business models: pay-per-use, revenue share or advertisement based. Clouds will also support th econcept of  “Mashup as a Service” that will allow end users selecting “parts” of each application, and then, combining them with other applications parts and/or telecommunications services.
• Clouds becoming a more complex programming environments, adding standard API (Application Programming Interfaces) specialized, for example, in the user context-aware access or the use of telecommunications (SMS/MMS submission, device localization, etc.).

Telefónica I+D is actively participating in leading Cloud R&D projects: RESERVOIR (FP7) and NUBA (Spanish Plan Avanz@) for evolution of hosting, 4WARD (FP7) and IRMOS (FP7) for network virtualization and QoS, and EzWeb (Plan Avanz@) for “Mashup as a Service” concepts.

The presentation slides are available here.

Yet another recent issue of the MIT technology review focused on Cloud technologies and why they may succeed there where so many others failed since the seventies. Virtualization, scaling, already existent real offer, seamless access to apps and data, reduced investment for startups, and boosting app development have been claimed as key elements for its potential success.

This same issue highlights one of our running projects, RESERVOIR,  as one of the 5 most relevant open source projects and research consortiums.

Current commercial IaaS (Infrastructure as a Service), like Amazon EC2, Felxiscale, GoGrid, etc., provide hosting clouds solutions based on computing, storage and networking virtualization. Through proprietary APIs and management tools, normally offered on Internet, customers can manage virtual machines images with an specific OS installed, and ask for their deployment in the Cloud. These cloud providers bill for the usage of infrastructure in a pay-per-use way.

But, are current Hosting Clouds enough for deploying Enterprise Services?

Read the rest of this entry »

In the general context of cloud interoperability (to decouple the application the cloud user wants to deploy from the cloud infrastructure to which that deployment is issued), OVF has been suggested several times as a very promising candidate. Using this standard (produced by the DMTF), virtual machine based services can be packaged in a vendor a platform neutral way, which makes it very suitable for IaaS clouds.

This “statements of interest” include the Citrix partnership with rPath to “extend Kensho [the flagship OVF-related public Citrix project] to support the deployment of OVF appliances in infrastructure clouds, starting with Amazon EC2”, the Oracle and Intel collaboration to “extend standards that enable portability of virtual machines images such as Open Virtual Format (OVF) and also create Web services standards for provisioning and management of cloud-based services” and the VMware’s vCloud initiative that “will build upon that work [OVF] by submitting a draft of its VMware vCloud API to enable consistent mobility, provisioning, management, and service assurance of applications running in internal and external clouds”.

Although support from the main industrial players is undoubtedly important, these statements basically are no more than declaration of intentions (with the possible exception of vCloud API, but which is too obscure yet to have a precise idea about it). They don’t go further analysing the (not trivial) problems of OVF applied to cloud infrastructure. It is worth mentioning that OVF was not designed with cloud computing in mind, so there are issues that need to be solved when applied to this environment, in particular, on automatic elasticity (OVF is designed for static deployments only), self-configuration (OVF is designed to use customization parameters that are known in pre-deployment time, which is not realistic in clouds) and deployment constraints (OVF don’t include any mechanism to provide hints for deployment, that are specially relevant in clouds due to business criteria, e.g. the database with the data of my customers can not be deployed outside my country due to regulations).

The RESERVOIR project (focused on federation of clouds at infrastructural level) is doing so. We have analysed the aforementioned problems and we are proposing extensions to OVF to solve them. This is not just theoretical work, because it is backed by an actual cloud middleware prototype. Eventually those extensions could be proposed to DMTF to enhance the OVF specification (now that even Winston Bumpus, the President of the DMTF itself, has expressed the OVF target in cloud, describing the standard as “an ideal cloud migration and deployment package” in the recent SATCCI Workshop) when the appropriated maturity level gets achieved.

By the moment, we have submitted a paper to COMSWARE’09 (authored by Telefónica, SAP, IBM and Sun, four major companies in the ICT industry) performing an early analysis of the problems in detail and proposing solutions (among all the possible ones) to adapt OVF to clouds. It has been accepted for publication, so by mid June the details will be disclosed and we will be very happy to share this knowledge and get feedback for others working on the interesting and hop topic of cloud interoperability.