Month: February 2015

How to install and setup Monasca (3/3)

In this final part of the tutorial we will verify that all things are working properly.

Because of the large number of moving components the norm is that things will go wrong. Code changes daily both in Monasca and in Openstack and quite often things need further adjusting.

As a general rule, in case a component is misbehaving, change logging from INFO to DEBUG in /etc/monasca and restart the component. The look at the logs in /var/log/monasca and see what is wrong. For Thresh / Storm, logs can be found in /opt/storm/current/logs

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How to install and setup Monasca (2/3)

In this part of the tutorial, we will install and configure all Monasca components.

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Amrita Prasad

APAmrita Prasad is the new business development and community manager at ICCLab. Before joining ICCLab she was the fundraiser volunteer at ROKPA International in Zurich, raising funds for the education of poor children in Zimbabwe. She has had numerous work experience right from brief stints at University of Florida where she held baby alligators for Reptile exhibitions, to preparing and cataloguing python heads. She has masters in International Business from University of Birmingham, UK.

She is responsible for the business development of the lab, looking after the lab’s business relations and also organising their several events (community related activities). She brings with herself experiences that she gained while living in UK, USA, France and now in Switzerland. In her free time, she loves photography and sometimes poetry!

Contact: amrita.prasad[at]zhaw.ch

Concertation meeting on “Network Technologies – Future Internet Architectures Cluster”

by Josef Spillner

This is to announce the next Concertation meeting on “Network Technologies – Future Internet Architectures Cluster” is going to take place on 25.03.2015 in Brussels, collocated with Net Futures 2015.

Since the previous meeting on 22nd Oct 2014, 7 new projects have been joined and included in the cluster (these are BEBA, ENDEAVOUR, NEAT, POINT, reTHINK, RIFE and UMOBILE). Each of them will be holding a short presentation on their objectives and methodology during the meeting. 2 projects (eCOUSIN and LEONE) coming to an end will be presenting their main achieved results.

Next in the agenda items, there is a timeslot of 90 minutes for short presentations and open discussion on “SDN/NFV and Network Apps”, addressed by many ongoing projects.

The meeting is from 9:00 to 12:30 and all the information, including registration, can be found on http://netfutures2015.eu/.

The agenda of the meeting is,

(March 25, 2015, Brussels)

9:00 – 9:10 Welcome

9:10 – 9:30 Presentation results of recently finished cluster projects eCOUSIN LEONE (10′ each including Q&A)

9:30-10:30 Presentation objectives of new cluster projects BEBA ENDEAVOUR NEAT POINT reTHINK RIFE UMOBILE (5′ each plus Q&A)

10:30-10:50 Coffee break

10:50-12:20 “SDN/NFV and Network Apps – a view from the cluster”

– Short presentations (≤ 3 slides) from the projects

– Open discussion

– Preparation of short paper with joint vision

12:20-12:30 Closing: next steps

MCN presenting at the iJoin Winter-School – impressions and major take-aways

The iJoin-Project is organizing an 5G-Winter-School, hosted by the University of Bremen. As part of the very distinct and representative program, the ICCLab is invited to present the latest results of the Mobile-Cloud-Networking (MCN) project.

Some impressions and take-aways from the event.

Simone Redana, Nokia, Germany, 5G RAN Architecture for virtualization RAN

  • 5G not only about radio interface (in 6GHz, etc)
  • New architecture needed, generally “Multi-Radio-Cloud, Core-Cloud, using SDN-xHaul and offering API-GWs
  • 5G-RAN-Cloud-Features: multi-connectivity, central radio-resource-mgt, application aware resource scheduling
  • Core-Cloud-Features: NFV-enabled
  • 5G features network slicing, e.g. a virtual overlay over the physical infrastructure for particular services/tenants

Clare Somerville, Intel, UK, Small Cell Forum, Small Cell Forum Advances within Network Virtualization

  • Small Cell Forum (SCF) is a non-for-profit organisation fouunded in 2007, with 150+ members, current specification release is #5 (Release-5)
  • Base-line: Two BIG innovations driving mobile networks, these are HetNets and NFV
  • Can “virtualization” be applied to small cell architectures? SCF believes yes it can
  • Small Cells to out-pace Cloud-RAN (RAN virtualization) deployments by 2019
  • Major challenge is the split between the physical and virtual part of the small cell RAN
  • The functional split poses requirements on the front haul technology, currently incompatible with the Ethernet-based standard deployed currently

2015-02-24 10.09.042015-02-24 09.54.21

Prof. Dr. Hans Schotten, University of Kaiserslautern, METIS

  • Connected Car and Traffic Control Systems (ITS) an important 5G-Use-Case
  • Human-controlled Robots 5G use case too

2015-02-24 10.27.02

Ralf Irmer, Vodafone, UK

  • 5G Services for Industrial Control Systems seem to bear great potential
  • 5G Research Challenge, Reliability of 5G services not yet ready to support Industrial Control
  • 5G Use Case Tactile Internet, requires in particular very low delay

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  •  Software Defined Architecture (TMB: Is this something new?)

 Ignacio Berberana, Telefónica I+D, Spain, iJOIN, Telefónica’s view on virtualized mobile networks

  • Telco innovation largely influenced by HW
  • While many mobile network architectures look simplified, in reality they need many supporting functions which make real networks much more complex
  • Many new technologies never tested nor evaluated in close-to-real environments
  • A combination of SDN and NFV may bring virtualization into the network/telco
  • A virtualized network will require a deep transformation of company-internal structures, which was traditionally more leaning toward silos

How to install and setup Monasca (1/3)

In my previous blog post I covered my initial impressions on Monasca. In the following trilogy I will cover its installation, setup, and testing. The installation will be performed for the Java version of Monasca, as some components have both Java and Python code available. For those which only need a quick local setup best would be to use the vagrant setup found here.

The installation will be performed on Ubuntu 14.04 and will be split into 3 posts. The first one (this one) will cover dependency installation and configuration, the next one will cover Monasca’s installation and configuration, and the final one will cover the testing of the whole setup.

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Openstack Summit – vote early, vote often!

Following from our successful and fun outing at the Openstack Summit in Paris (read all about our adventures here, here and here ) at which Vojtech and Srikanta gave talks on live migration and rating, charging and billing respectively (videos here), we’re getting prepped up for the next one in Vancouver.

This time out, we’ve thrown our hat into the ring twice. Victor has put something together on his adventures with Monasca and I’m hoping to talk a bit about our energy focused work.

We’ll describe our preliminary development on Watchtower which is a Cloud Incident Management solution that is built on a bunch of technologies including Monasca, Camunda, and Rundeck. It provides workflow and process automation empowered by BPMN 2.0 for handling the incidents’ lifecycle, and runbook automation in order to resolve them automatically. Vote here if you’re interested in this.

On the energy side, we’re hoping to talk about our work on our Kwapi based energy monitoring tool and some of the work we have been doing on advanced energy based control systems for openstack which leverage live migration mechanisms to ensure energy efficiency is maximized. Vote here if you’re interested in hearing about this at the summit (or if you’re interested in this generally!)

We’re really looking forward to seeing what’s new in Openstack in Hollywood North in May!

Cloud-Native Applications Seed Project: Migration-Process Part 1

As stated in a previous blog-post, at the beginning of this year we started with the project of migrating the open-source application Zurmo CRM into the cloud. In this first blog-post on the progress of this process we will describe our initial plan, show the basic components of a cloud-optimized application and talk about whether to stick with the monolithic architecture style of Zurmo or migrate it to a microservices architecture. We’ll furthermore discuss the first steps we took in migrating Zurmo to the cloud and how we plan to continue.

TL;DR

  • We use the term cloud-optimized to describe an application which has the same characteristics as a cloud-native applicaton but is the result of a migration process.
  • The basic components of a cloud-optimized application are: Application Core, Enabling Systems, Monitoring- and Management-Systems. All of which have to be scalable and resilient.
  • A monolithic architecture style is best suited for smaller applications (little functionality / low number of developers) resp. when starting to build a new application.
  • A microservices architecture style is best suited for large applications (lots of functionality / high number of developers). Its benefits are less of a technical nature but more of the way it helps to manage the development and deployment of applications.
  • We decided to stick with the monolithic architecture. The first change we did to the application was to horizontally scale the web server with the use of a load balancer and make the application core stateless.

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Extended Call for Papers for International Workshop on Automated Incident Management in Cloud (AIMC’15)

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CALL FOR PAPERS AND PARTICIPATION
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International Workshop on Automated Incident Management in Cloud (AIMC’15)
April 21-24 2015, Bordeaux, France
http://aimc.io/

Held in conjunction with
European Conference on Computer Systems (EuroSys)
http://eurosys2015.labri.fr/ Continue reading