Service Engineering (ICCLab & SPLab)

A Blog of the ZHAW Zurich University of Applied Sciences

Month: May 2015

Lightning Sparks all around: A comprehensive analysis of popular distributed computing frameworks (ABDA’15)

27. May 2015 / / 0 Comments

Distributed Computing Frameworks

Big Data processing has been a very current topic for the last ten or so years. In order to process Big Data, special software frameworks have been developed. Nowadays, these frameworks are usually based on distributed computing because horizontal scaling is cheaper than vertical scaling. But horizontal scaling imposes a new set of problems when it comes to programming. A traditional programmer feels safer in a well-known environment that pretends to be a single computer instead of a whole cluster of computers. In order to deal with this problem, several programming and architectural patterns have been developed, most importantly MapReduce and the use of distributed file systems. There are several OpenSource frameworks that implement these patterns. Continue reading

SDN Workshop, 11th June 2015, University of Bern

20. May 2015 / / 0 Comments

ICCLab is happy to announce the upcoming SDN Workshop, that we are co-organising with SWITCH, will take place on Thursday, 11th of June 2015 – 09:00am to 6:00pm.

Location: University of Bern, Main Building, HG , 1st. Floor, Room 115

The aim of this Workshop is to share knowledge, have hands on sessions/presentations on SDN/NFV, Security, Cloud Computing and Service Delivery to the end-user, students, staff and researchers, providing a complete picture with ICT approaches, industry solutions, innovation and research.

Kindly register here to confirm your participation.

Agenda of the day is: 

09:15 – Welcome and Introduction

1st Session – 4 Presentations:

1. zSDN, a lossless networking architecture for workload-driven high performance Cloud – Mitch Gusat, IBM Research Labs Zurich

2. ENDEAVOUR H2020 project, enabling next-generation programmatic network services in Internet eXchange Points (IXPs) –  Marco Canini, Université catholique de Louvain, Belgium

3. Cloud Networking, Open Daylight and OpenStack – Irena Trajkovska, ICCLab, ZHAW

4. Open Cloud Exchange – Kurt Baumann, SWITCH

Lunch Break (1 hour)

2nd Session – 4 Presentations:

5. Architecture for application-centric wireless access using SDN – Panagiotis Papadimitriou, University of Hanover

6. SDN Network at Uni. of Bern – Zhongliang Zhao, University of Bern

7. Title coming soon – Microsoft Zurich

8. Pending

Wrap-up (17:00 – 18:00) – Discussion, next steps and networking

We would like to invite you to participate and request you to register here, so that we have the exact number of participants (to estimate the lunch requirement). To kindly note, registration is mandatory. 

Thanks and see you there!

Cloud Foundry Summit 2015

19. May 2015 / / 0 Comments

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The Cloud Foundry Summit 2015 (third Cloud Foundry conference in total) took place this year on May 11th and 12th at the Santa Clara Convention Center. Attending already the second time it was great to see how the community and ecosystem is growing and the products are maturing.

With more than 1500 attendees,  the event was about 50% larger than last year. But more interestingly the ratio of vendors to customers changed from about 80%/20% to approximately 60%/40%, which shows the raising momentum of Cloud Foundry and PaaS in general.

The two days where packed with very interesting presentations in the key-notes and break-out sessions. It was a nice mix of vendor presentations, customer / user experience reports and technical talks on development, operations and internals of Cloud Foundry. Beside the talks there was plenty of other activities like Open House or Birds of Feather (BoF) sessions, evening events and “the Foundry”, a large exhibition, meeting and recreation area, which was ideal to get in touch with vendors and customers. For the first time there was also a diversity BoF and Lunch with more than 100 female attendees addressing the diversity gaps in the Open Source community.

All the talks have been recorded on video and made available here.

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Sam Ramj (CEO of Cloud Foundry Foundation) opening the summit.

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ICCLab awarded AWS in Education Grant

13. May 2015 / / 0 Comments

Great news from the other side of the pond!

The ICCLab Cloud-Native Applications (CNA) initiative has been awarded an AWS Research Education grant for accessing cloud resources on the Amazon Web Services (AWS) platform. Congrats to Sandro and Giovanni (yours truly) for the achievement and a big thanks to Amazon for this.

The AWS Research education grant provides credit for using AWS services for education and research purposes. As a teacher or a researcher, you can experiment with all the current AWS services and grant access to your students and collaborators. You can find more information about it and the form to apply here: http://aws.amazon.com/grants/

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Watchtower v1.0.0 just released!

7. May 2015 / / 0 Comments

WatchtowerToday marks the release of Watchtower v1.0.0. Watchtower is a Cloud Incident Management solution that we, the ICCLab, have been working on. It has been developed as part of the initiative with the same name primarily by Victor Munteanu. Continue reading

A simple script to identify suspicious VMs on your cloud

4. May 2015 / / 0 Comments

Operating an Openstack cloud infrastructure is not a trivial task which requires constant oversight of the use of the cloud resources. Sophisticated monitoring is necessary to ensure that the system continues to operate properly and delivers satisfactory performance to the users. One aspect of monitoring a cloud infrastructure pertains to ensuring that the system exposes a minimal attack surface: this means ensuring that a minimum amount of the system is exposed, particularly ports on public IP addresses. We are developing a basic set of monitoring and administration tools, one of which focuses on identifying VMs that may be too exposed. Here, we provide a brief description of this tool.

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