Month: November 2015 (page 1 of 2)

Orchestrating IMS – Project Clearwater on CloudStack using Heat and Hurtle

Project Clearwater is an open source implementation of IP Multimedia Subsystem (IMS) developed for scalable deployment in the cloud to provide voice, video and messaging services. There has been  work done before on orchestrating Clearwater in OpenStack using Cloudify. We, in cooperation with our partner – Citrix, present orchestration of this system in Apache CloudStack using OpenStack Heat with our recent plugin. Continue reading

OpenStack Heat plugin for Apache CloudStack

This blog post presents a plugin for OpenStack Heat which adds support for Apache CloudStack resources and thus enables a template-based orchestration on CloudStack using Heat. As this plugin extends the standard Heat’s resource type list it can also be used within our Hurtle orchestrator for providing your application as a service or any other application underlying on Heat. This work follows from our earlier work in which we developed a Heat plugin for SDC. Continue reading

Introducing the official ICCLab linux distro optimized for simple hypervisor contexts

We needed to deploy a simple hypervisor on one of our internal systems. This system was disconnected from the Internet for some particular reasons and it was surprisingly difficult to find a suitable bundled linux distribution which provided the features we needed. Ubuntu desktop does not come with KVM, ubuntu server does not have X, so it’s not easy to run virt-manager on the machine. There were no CentOS versions that provided the right mix of capabilities; oVirt-node was one reasonable candidate, but it only exposed a management interface which needed to be run remotely or else somehow packaged with the system. One of our colleagues is a big fan of proxmox, but this is overkill for the simple single hypervisor case we wanted.

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5th Swiss SDN Workshop highlights

Last Friday, 13th November the 5th SDN workshop took place at the SWITCH premises in Zurich. With 9 presentations covering different aspects of Software Defined Networking and around 40 attendees, we are happy to bring together the academia and industry partners on the same table in order to provide to the community a complete overview of the most recent results, products and open source SDN solutions.

 

switch_kurt

Compared with the previous workshops, talks from the industry were prevalent this time, which brought variety but most importantly an intent to close the gap between SDN research projects and grand-scale solutions based on customer use cases.

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SPLab organizing Cloud Native Applications Workshop

We’re proud to announce that SPLab is organizing the First International Workshop on Cloud Native Applications Design and ExperienceCNAX 2016.

It will be co-located with the 10th IEEE Symposium on Service-Oriented Systems — SOSE 2016 in Oxford.

You can find more information about the workshop and the CFP on the CNAX 2016 page.

Important Dates:

  • Paper submission: December 21, 2015
  • Notification of acceptance: January 18, 2016
  • Camera-ready submission: February 1, 2016
  • Author and early registration: February 1, 2016

We are organizing the event together with Jorge Cardoso from the Huawei European Research Center (ERC).
We have an amazing PC with top researchers from both industry (e.g., Google, IBM, Red Hat, Huawei) and academia.

Cloud native applications is a new topic which is growing fast and we’re delighted to be involving in it.
Help us spread the word, submit a paper, and come to the workshop, we are looking forward to that!

ICCLab @ 5th Conference on Complex Adaptive Systems

On November 4th 2015 Konstantin Benz, researcher at ICCLab, presented an adaptive cloud application in the “Complex Adaptive Systems” conference in San Jose, California. “Complex Adaptive Systems” is a conference organized by Missouri University of Science and Technology (MST) which takes place every year and which includes topics like machine learning, data analytics and smart system architectures. Conference proceedings are published in the Procedia Computer Science journal by Elsevier.

The 5th Conference about “Complex Adaptive Systems” is dedicated to technologies that provide solutions to complex problems we face in everyday life. Complexity is everywhere. A complex system may be the traffic system in California which produces unforeseen traffic jams. Another complex system may be the power grid that delivers electric power to every household every day without any interruption. Or a complex system may be just the  order of your favorite cereals that land in your bowl for breakfast. Complex systems are more than just systems which are a little bit complicated to observe. Continue reading

Networking and Security in an Openstack Compute Node: a complex combination of iptables and (linux and OVS) bridging…

We had to investigate the operation of one of our Openstack compute nodes as it was exhibiting some unusual behaviour. We quickly determined that there was some unexpected packet loss and we had reason to believe that this could have been due to the packet processing in the node. Investigating this problem necessitated some deeper exploration of how packets are processed in the node, particularly relating to the mix of ovs bridges, linux bridges and iptables. It turns out that this is rather complex and clear information describing how all this fits together in detail is not readily available. Here, we note what we learnt from this exploration.

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MySQL Galera cluster with Fleet on CoreOS

In the context of the Cloud-Native Applications (CNA) Initiative at SPLab, we kicked off a few months ago a seed project with the aim of getting practical experience of the most common problems and pitfalls of re-architecting a legacy web application for the cloud. Here, we report on our experiences with a specific focus on the thorny problem of realizing a scalable, distributed database backend for such an application.

Cloud-native applications

The main characteristics of a cloud-native application is that it has to be resilient and elastic, and this has to be true for all the (micro)services and components that make up the application.

After choosing the Zurmo CRM application and making the Web server tier stateless, we concentrated on decomposing the application into containers, allowed multiple instances of Memcached to run concurrently, added a “dockerized” ELK stack for monitoring, and finally our own configurable auto-scaling engine (Dynamite).

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Announcing CF WebUI – an open source web interface to Cloud Foundry

We proudly announce the release of CF WebUI!

CF WebUI is a modern single-page web front-end for Cloud Foundry based on AngularJS and Bootstrap. It is developed at the ICCLab as an open source alternative to commercial and proprietary web-consoles for Cloud Foundry.

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Installing OpenShift Origin v3 on OpenStack

In this blog post we will describe the necessary steps to get an installation of OpenShift Origin v3 up and running on OpenStack. OpenShift Origin v3 offers a ton of features over its predecessor we covered over a year ago. Most notably is the support for Docker containers and the usage of Kubernetes.

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