After the advent of the IaaS Era, new steps need to be taken in order to reduce the inherent complexity and administrator effort these systems still require. IaaS offers the illusion of virtually infinite resources provided on an on-demand basis and based in a pay as you go model with no other upfront commitment.
These features are very appealing for system administrators, but they still require huge efforts from systems admins and developers. Platform as a Service (PaaS) Clouds offer developers a higher abstraction level to help them fasten their application production and do it in a reliable manner (reducer number of bugs) due to the hugely increased reuse of software pieces. PaaS is about offering developing libraries as a service to ease programming and maintenance tasks.
To survive in today’s economy; short time-to-market and efficiency are paramount for the creation of innovative products and to survive in the current economic climate. This is especially true for IT services which will dominate the way people work and live in the future. Cloud computing is essentially changing the way services are built, provided and consumed. Despite simple access to Clouds, building elastic services is still an elitist domain and proprietary technologies are an entry barrier especially to SMEs and consequently, it remains largely within the domain of established players.
To accelerate the creation of highly demanded tailored services in a timely manner, the Cloud paradigm requires major change to address the way services are built, provided and accessed. Abstracting from technical complexities lowers entry barriers and empowers SMEs in especial, to offer applications to this significant market without large upfront investments. The project envisions: An Internet-scale application platform for design, operation, management, and trading of services and service compositions which can be tailored to different local or global communities. 4CaaST will provide benefits and business opportunities for the following stakeholders: • Application Providers can focus on building applications integrating the latest IT and Telco interaction (NaaS) paradigms. Particular emphasis will be paid to scalability, lifecycle and resource management. • Platform Providers can instantiate and efficiently operate a 4CaaST platform as a service and can establish an eco-system via the 4CaaST marketplace. • Service Aggregators can focus on value added services through composition and mashup. The project will bring significant benefits to the European economy. It will provide an easy to use Infrastructure for a More Competitive Environment, greatly simplifying design and delivery of tailored services and compositions.
A recent article in ACM Queue highlights the importance of scalability to help distinguish what a Cloud really is against hype and all the confusion that has been around for some time.From this blog, we feel we have contributed to reducing the hype around the Cloud definition with or ACM CCR article back in 2009. Also, a series of books devoted to the topic. This paperwork has recently been crowned with the release of an actual open source implementation for automatically scaling services on the Cloud, Claudia.Also from this humble corner, we have been trying to build awareness on the importance on Cloud Security to help delivering the vision of the Cloud.The article by Dustin Owens (from BT Americas) combines our two most significant research and development lines into a single one, emphasizing the relevance of security for elasticity and, thus, for the Cloud itself.In order to maintain our well-gained reputation as writing-hype curmudgeons, we would like to criticize the link established in the article between virtualization as a key enabler for elasticity. Even when it is true that virtualization and the subsequent multitenancy helps to reduce TCOs, scalable systems have been there for a while, even before virtualization reached the mainstream. In addition, scaling VMs is still very cumbersome for service providers, a higher degree of automation and abstraction is still required (see Rodero-Merino et al. for further details).
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.
The Center for Software Technologies at Telefónica has recently published a series of 4 Book Chapters derived from the international recognition of its results in the field.
These Chapters hold the opinions and result from world-class experts in the field in renowned Editorials such as IOSPress, Springer or IGI global.The first Chapter elaborates on the Cloud definition and the advantages of its usage in business-aware systems beyond academic or experimental environments.
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