Service Engineering (ICCLab & SPLab)

A Blog of the ZHAW Zurich University of Applied Sciences

Month: September 2015

Carlo Vallati visits ICCLab

28. September 2015 / / 0 Comments

Carlo Vallati visited the lab in Aug/Sept 2015 – here is a short note he wrote on his time here.

I had the pleasure of visiting ICCLab during Aug/Sept 2015 to work on a research proposal. By way of background, I am a postdoctoral researcher with Computer Networking Group (CNG) at the University of Pisa. My research interest focuses on the Internet of Things and Machine-to-Machine applications.

I visited the ICCLab for a month to write a proposal for the prestigious EU Horizon 2020 Marie Skłodowska-Curie Individual Fellowship scheme. The proposal focuses on providing cloud support for the execution of Machine-to-Machine applications – applications that rely on direct interactions with objects such as sensors and actuators – with low latency interaction requirements. In particular, the project will work on extending the current cloud computing architecture through the integration of cloud nodes close to physical devices, e.g. Fog nodes or Local Data Centers. Should the proposal be successful, it will provide funding to enable me to work on this topic with ICCLab and an industry partner (the proposal includes a secondment to a specific industry partner). Continue reading

Initial Experience with Openstack Nova Cells

25. September 2015 / / 0 Comments

In the GEYSER project, we are examining suitable Openstack architectures for our pilot deployments. In an earlier blog post we described different ways to architect  an Openstack deployment mostly focusing on AZ (Availability Zone) and Cells (those were the only options available back in 2013). Much has changed since then and new concepts were added such as regions and host aggregates. Even though Cells have been available since Grizzly they are still considered experimental due to lack of maturity and instability. In this blog post we describe our experience enabling Cells in an experimental Openstack deployment.

Why Cells?

The documentation says that “Cells functionality enables you to scale an OpenStack Compute cloud in a more distributed fashion without having to use complicated technologies like database and message queue clustering. It supports very large deployments”. Although we don’t have a large deployment this is pretty much in line with our requirements for our pilot – a distributed system with a single public API exposed. Comparing with other architectural approaches currently available the one which gets closer to this design are regions, but even then is not desirable as it exposes a public API for each region. Continue reading

Two upcoming publications accepted at 8th IEEE/ACM International Conference on Utility and Cloud Computing (UCC 2015)

22. September 2015 / / 0 Comments

by Josef Spillner

ucc

Researchers from the Service Prototyping Lab have found new methods to tame and control cloud infrastructure and platform services which, despite the best intentions by the providers, are often volatile, unavailable or unreliable. With the new methods, applications remain mostly unaffected from the problems. Two publications about the methods will be presented at the upcoming 8th IEEE/ACM UCC conference and the co-located CloudAM workshop.

Continue reading

11th OpenStack & 4th Docker Switzerland User Group Meetup

10. September 2015 / / 0 Comments

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Tuesday evening (8th Sept 2015) we organised the OpenStack CH and Docker CH user group meetup. It was jointly held this time. The kind folks from IBM Zürich hosted the event in their premises and also co-sponsored with organising food and drinks. The other sponsor for the event was Joyent, the San Francisco based company, and one of whose open source products is Triton, formerly known as SDC (SmartDataCenter), which we have been working with for some time.  Continue reading

Announcing SCALE-UP Project

7. September 2015 / / 0 Comments

ICCLab, ZHAW is pleased to announce the successful start of the project SCALE-UP which is funded under program CUS 2013-2016 P-2 from swissuniversities. The project consortium includes 9 leading universities of Switzerland including EPFL, Universities of Bern, Basel, St. Gallen, USI, ZHAW, FHNW, FFHS, and FHSG. The kick-off meeting took place on August 28, 2015, at the project coordinator’s premises. The consortium is led by SWITCH. Continue reading