As part of its exploitation strategy, Telefónica I+D decided to release as Open Source a number of components developed during the research on Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) Clouds.  These components will be integrated in the Claudia Platform that will offer a Service Management toolkit to deploy and control the scalability of service among a public or private IaaS Cloud. Telefónica I+D chooses MORFEO Project to release the software because it guarantees the access to the results of research beyond the end of the project.

By March 2010, the first set of components, which are part of the research results of the RESERVOIR project,  will be released:

• Service Lifecycle Manager that will control the deployment and dynamic scalability processes of the services.
• Scalability and Optimization Manager that will dynamically drive the configuration and scalability of the services.
• OVF Manager component, a library to parse and transform OVF files that contains the service definition.
• Service Monitoring Framework, based on the WASUP platform, will store and distribute the status of the services.
• Cloud Dashboard, based on the EzWeb mashup platform, will provide a Web GUI to manage the Cloud.
• The Service Manager Interface, an API that will allow developers to manage the deployment of their services as a whole.
• Implementation of the OCCI (Open Cloud Computing Interface) API to integrate Claudia with different Virtual Infrastructure managers.

These components will continue evolving and put into a “production” status by Telefónica I+D. Each component will be released with its own Open Source License (GPL, Apache, MPL, etc.). Telefónica I+D will also provide commercial support following a dual-license schema.

The Claudia Platform is aligned with the Morfeo’s Cloud Technologies Chapter vision of integrating a complete Open Source Stack for managing a IaaS Cloud. In this way, Claudia will be fully integrated with Open Nebula through the OCCI API as both are members of the chapter.

For more information about the Platform Architecture and other documentation, please visit our Wiki.

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.

Organised by OGF-Europe Project and its Industry Expert Group (IEG), the workshop will focus on the need of standards to ensure that solutions and applications which are deployed today can be used tomorrow while avoiding vendor lock-in to ensure freedom of choice based on cost versus performance. Cloudscape delivers important insights into the current and future cloud computing landscape in Europe with interoperability for innovation in commercial and research settings firmly mind. An expert group of enterprise members, researchers, policy makers, EC representatives and analyst will offer focused discussion on the board set of technologies and solutions that fall under the umbrella term of Cloud and Distributed Computing. Peruse the current agenda.

Registration is free of charge. Places are limited.

Venue: Hilton Brussels Hotel, Brussels Belgium

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Yes, I was trying to attract your attention with a “British tabloid” style heading here. The news is not at all so radically new, but now that I attracted your attention I beg you pardon and kindly ask you to allow me 4 minutes to sum up Amazon’s “new” billing model

Amazon announced spot pricing for cloud compute instances. EC2 customers can indicate their own price, and Amazon EC2 will bring compute instances up at variable discount prices according to these “bids” [1].

This move is in sync with their strategy  extra-cost reserved instances, which is regarded as an evolution by many, but, frankly resembles previous allocation models in Grid computing. Again, nothing new under the sun. Indeed, auction systems supported by software agents and expert systems have been in the market for long long time.

In [1], the authors raise a very interesting question that we generalize and rephrase here: Are different billing models needed for different Cloud service types? How many do we need per service type? Is the billing model the only important parameter here?

From this humble Internet corner, we bet that automated bidding systems will play a role for massive service provision and better prices to be acquired. Still, some important features are still missing such as for instance custom billing support for “VIP” clients.

[1]  http://web2.sys-con.com/node/1220487

vCloud is an initiative led by VMware and counts with the collaboration of more than 100 partner including  BT, Rackspace, SAVVIS, Sungard, T-Systems and Verizon Business. The main aim of vCloud is to provide a complete solution to deliver enterprise cloud services based on VMware technologies. The vCloud API will allow application providers to deploy their application among a cloud service provided by one of the vCloud partners.

The vCloud API is based on the principles of Representational State Transfer (REST).

The vCloud resource model includes next entities: the Organization that owns the applications, the Virtual Data Centre where different Resource Entities (Virtual Applications Templates, Media devices, and the Virtual Application) and Networks are instantiated. A Virtual Application is an aggregation of one or more Virtual Machines.

There are number of operations to query existing resources or summary of the Organiztation’s resources (GET <entity-uri>) and to delete an specific resource from a Virtual Application (DELETE <vapp-entity-uri>).

There is a Catalog  where users can register, get a summary, down/upload or delete a catalog item (vApp templates, media files such as ISO images, etc.).

vCloud application lifecycle model defines a number of steps where a number of operations can be performed:

• Provisioning: creation of clonning of VApps, instantiation of the vApp templates, upload or facilitate the location of vApp parts and instantiation of VApps defined in an OVF package.
• Configuration:  a client can reconfigure vApps by adding, removing or modifying OVF sections.
• Deployment: Reservation of all the resources requested by the vApp (POST <vapp-uri>/action/deploy)
• State Operations: once the resources are reserved the vApp have to be started by powering on all the resources (POST <vapp-uri>/power/action/powerOn), and later on it can be powered off, reset, suspended, shutdown, rebooted, etc.

As some of the previous operations can take time,pending task can be retireved (GET <task-list-uri>/<task-uri>) and cancelled (POST <task-uri>/action/cancel).

There are some other administrative operations to manage Organizations, Virtual Data Centres,  users, etc.

As conclusion, we see that the basic service lifecycle management is very well covered, but advanced features (dynamic scalability, SLA management, monitoring or usage accounting) that has been researched in projects as RESERVOIR are not included but it would not be difficult to extend this API to support them: the RESERVOIR’s OVF extensions could be adopted and some other operations or reporting data should be extended.