Newsletter LATEST NEWS. CELAR: THE CHALLENGE

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1 Newsletter Automatic, Multi-Grained Elasticity-provisioning for the Cloud NUMBER 1 LATEST NEWS CELARCLOUD.EU REACHES 350 MONTHLY VISITS CELAR: OUTCOME AND IMPACT CELAR: THE CHALLENGE Cloud computing as we know it is concerned with the notion of delivering computing as a service rather than a product. Through Cloud computing, on-demand, ubiquitous network access to a shared pool of configurable and often virtualized computing resources is achieved in a metered by use, cost-efficient manner. One of its most appealing (albeit challenging) characteristics is the ability to support elastic computing, namely the scaling of the infrastructure (IaaS), platform (PaaS) or software (SaaS) resources to meet the exact demand, performance or cost characteristics at runtime. Efficient resource allocation is of great importance in the realm of Cloud Computing READ FULL STORY MORE NEWS CELAR IN PICTURES CELAR: THE ARCHICTECTURE

2 2 CELAR: THE CHALLENGE Businesses, organizations and simple users alike witness wide variations in the load of their respective applications inside a timespan of a year, month, day or even a few minutes. Under-provisioning runs the risk of costly service unavailability at peak-hours, while provisioning for peak-load incurs increased costs and underutilized resources. Cloud computing refers to the notion of delivering computing as a service rather than a product. Through Cloud computing, ondemand, ubiquitous network access to a shared pool of configurable and often virtualized computing resources is achieved in a metered by use, cost-efficient manner. One of its most appealing (albeit challenging) characteristics is the ability to support elastic computing, namely the scaling of the infrastructure (IaaS), platform (PaaS) or software (SaaS) resources to meet the exact demand, performance or cost characteristics at runtime. Efficient resource allocation is of great importance in the realm of Cloud Computing. Businesses, organizations and simple users alike witness wide variations in the load of their respective applications inside a time-span of a year, month, day or even a few minutes. Underprovisioning runs the risk of encountering costly service unavailability during peakhours, while provisioning for peak-load incurs increased costs and underutilized resources. While many systems claim to offer elasticity, the throttling is usually performed manually: Users are required to define the conditions (the timing, the type of resources and their exact amount) for scaling their applications. However, it is difficult for a user to figure out the proper scaling conditions. Moreover, the needs of clients can often change dynamically, requiring different optimizations at different points in time. Finally, scaling a single resource (e.g., number of CPUs, storage or networking elements) or at coarse granularity leads to suboptimal use and performance degradation. Other approaches comprise proprietary services that run on dedicated servers, translating to lack of elasticity due to vendor lock-in and questionable performance. To harvest the benefits of elastic provisioning, it is imperative that it is performed in an automated, finegrained manner. We argue that elasticity cannot be dealt alone at the service provider side; programming tools for specifying elastic properties and their trade-offs during the design and development of cloud applications are further required.

3 NOVEMBER CELAR: THE CHALLENGE PART II 3 The proposed system specifically targets the following sets of users: Cloud Infrastructure and Platform providers: Our elasticity provisioning subsystem will be modular in both design and implementation and deployable with minimum effort across various commercial and open-source platforms. As a proof of concept, our system will be deployed over three infrastructures: Okeanos, an opensource IaaS hosted by Flexiant s in-house data-centre with increased API and platform customization capabilities. CELAR SYSTEM ARCHITECTURE Cloud Application developers and simple Users: The system will enable a wide range of users to easily utilize the resources of the underlying infrastructure through the use of an intuitive programming development environment plug-in to perform the task. Specifically, users will be able to define the application characteristics, including cost and quality and their tradeoffs, for optimal resource allocation at design-time and runtime and will submit their applications without havinge to manually perform resource mappings and bindings. Search capabilities for making Cloud resources easily accessible to endusers will be provided. To circumvent the burdensome installation and integration process, our project offers a unique cloudification feature that allows click-andgo installation of the application over the CELAR system.

4 4 CELAR: THE CHALLENGE PART II (continued) Cloud administrators: the prototype will enable administrators to manage and monitor the available resources (storage, processing and networking). A Cloud resource description framework will be introduced, which will be used for conceptual description of Cloud resources and will support visualization and search. CELAR IN PICTURES CELAR at Researchers Night, Limassol, Cyprus CELAR IN PUBLICATIONS October issue Featuring CELAR plenary meeting in Edinburgh, Scotland Read now

5 5 CELAR: OUTCOME AND IMPACT PART I The outcome of the proposed project is a modular, completely opensource system that offers elastic programmability for the user and automatic elasticity at the platform level. This outcome can be bundled in a single software package for oneclick installation of any elastic application together with its automated management over a Cloud infrastructure. Specifically the following are defined as CELAR outcomes: The elasticity provisioning subsystem, which elastically and automatically manages platform resources in a customizable manner; The cloud-eclipse (c-eclipse) framework (adapted and extended from the g-eclipse official Eclipse project) that provides plug-ins for accessing and managing Cloud resources on the envisioned platform; A scalable, multi-layer, real-time Cloud Monitoring tool that gathers a rich set of platform, infrastructure and applicationside metrics and evaluates them in a composite fashion. CELAR modules will be both generic and open-source, in order to allow for maximum utilization and ease of adaptation with existing commercial, academic and community systems. Providing added value and greatly simplifying application deployment over CELAR, the project will develop Project Periodic Report (1 st period) 8 a framework for the cloudification of any elasticity-demanding cloud application with the CELAR system, offering this integration into a single installable software package. Cloud Computing is both from the technology point of view and its business repercussions an important driver for ICT development in Europe and for the knowledgebased society itself. CELAR technology plans to produce a complete open-source eco-system that provides automatic, multi-grained, real-time elasticity for any application that runs on a cloud platform.

6 5 CELAR: OUTCOME AND IMPACT PART II The management system and composing modules, as well as the integration with elasticitydemanding applications will contribute to increased application performance, optimal use of infrastructural resources, high cost-reductions and open, standardized access to the cloud ecosystem. These features empower CELAR project with the potential to become a valuable European technological and economic asset. CELAR thus actively contributes to two major goals defined by the digital agenda: interoperability and open access for ICT products and services and boosting cutting-edge research and innovation in ICT. Furthermore, through our user partners and the respective application domains as well as the unique cloudification process, we show how CELAR enhances the potential of ICT to benefit society: The SCAN pipelines that will be developed as part of this project will be made available to the wider cancer research community. Since CELAR will reduce the time taken to process cancer patient data sets, and thus speed the entire discovery and analysis process, we expect that SCAN via the CELAR platform will be widely adopted by Translational Cancer Research and Hospitals for cancer treatment. Showcasing our two applications with their embedded automatic elasticity feature and advanced cloud programming environment has a high potential for triggering new adoption opportunities (business ideas), paving the ground for the development of innovative services and products in various types of domains that require multi-layer cost reduction, automatic resource distribution and fast application deployment over the cloud. The project will thus also help to drive and stimulate product, service and process innovation and creativity through ICT use as well as open up new business opportunities for SMEs working as service providers, application developers or in the large-scale information management technologies. Newsletter Automatic, Multi-Grained Elasticity-provisioning for the Cloud

7 7 CELARCLOUD.EU REACHES 350 MONTHLY VISITS At the start of the project, the CELAR team created a branded website which contained branded material, project and partner information and downloadable assets. It furthermore provided a dynamic platform for blog publishing and served as a gateway to social media channels. These social media channels provided a platform to promote information and project assets as well as producing the foundations of an international networking community. This was also tied to a thorough system of gathering web analytics. The website proved to be particularly successful with the most recent stats showing that the site is now more popular than during the initial launch period where interest had previously been highest. The steady growth in social media reach also proved to be successful in driving attention to the project assets. CELAR on Wikipedia The creation of a Wikipedia page for the project using authentic and trusted secondary webs sources vindicated the use of press releases in the early stages of the project and has provided digital exposure for the project. The most popular month for CELAR s website proved to be September with over 350 visits, up from January s figure of 244. this shows just how much the popularity of CELAR has grown in year one. FIND CELAR ONLINE Newsletter Automatic, Multi-Grained Elasticity-provisioning for the Cloud