Service Engineering (ICCLab & SPLab)

A Blog of the ZHAW Zurich University of Applied Sciences

Category: Community (page 2 of 4)

ICCLab presents Interoperability and APIs in OpenStack @ EGI Technical Forum, Cloud Interoperability Week

2. October 2013 / / 1 Comment

The ICCLab was invited to give a talk on Interoperability and APIs in OpenStack at EGI Technical Forum which was co-located with Cloud Interoperability Week. The workshop and hands-on tutorial sessions took place between September 18-20, 2013 in the beautiful city of Madrid.

The presentation sessions were followed by panel discussion where all the speakers entertained several questions from the audience. There was substantial interest in the audience with respect to OCCI development roadmap and questions were also raised on suitability of one cloud standard against another.

In the tutorial sessions that followed the workshop, there were several projects that demonstrated their use of the OCCI standard. Notable among them were OpenStack, OpenNebula, and CompatibleOne.

[slideshare id=26782772&doc=interoperabilityandapisinopenstack-131002072248-phpapp01]

CLEEN 2014 – Call for Papers

19. September 2013 / / 0 Comments

The Future Internet will consists in more flexible radio access networks which are less centralized than the network infrastructure we have today. Integration of flexible heterogeneous radio access networks in HetNets will allow further social diffusion of the mobile internet. Therefore the IEEE is exploring novel concepts to allow for flexibly centralised radio access networks using cloud-processing based on open IT platforms. The Second International Workshop on “Cloud Technologies and Energy Efficiency in Mobile Communication Networks” (CLEEN) 2014 is scheduled for April 2014 in Istanbul, Turkey. The goal of the workshop is research and discussion of technologies which enable cloud-based radio access networks that allow for high quality networking in terms of energy efficiency and cost-effectiveness. Building the Future Internet as a cloud-based Internet requires new concepts for the design, operation, and
optimization of radio access networks and backhaul networks as well as a tight integration of networks in cloud-processing IT infrastructures. Therefore a call for papers is assigned.

Paper submission deadline is: October 15th 2013

Acceptance Notification: December 15th 2013
Camera-ready: January 10th 2013

Further Information about the CLEEN 2014 can be found here:

http://www.ict-ijoin.eu/cleen2014/

CloudStack: Build a Cloud Day, 25th of Sept, Geneva, Switzerland.

4. September 2013 / / 0 Comments

CloudStack: Build a Cloud Day Geneva, Switzerland. Sept 25th

Come learn about Apache CloudStack, its features, its use cases and its community.

  • 8:30-9:00 Coffee
  • 9:00-9:30 Cloud Ecosystem at the Apache Software Foundation -Sebastien Goasguen, Citrix
  • 9:30-10:10 Deploying Clouds in the Enterprise -Pierre Vacherand, Apalia
  • 10:10-10:30 Break
  • 10:30-11:10 A Swiss Cloud Provider: Exoscale -Antoine Coetsier, Exoscale
  • 11:10-11:50 The Slipstream multi-cloud broker -Marc Elian Begin, Sixsq
  • 11:50-12:20 Swiss Academic Cloud-Sergio Maffioletti, University of Zurich

12:20-13:30 Lunch

  • 13:30-14:15 Operating a Cloud -Pierre Yves Ritschard, Exoscale
  • 14:15-15:00 Combining Grid and Cloud -Mohamed Ben Belgacem, hepia
  • 15:00-15:15 Break
  • 15:15-16:00 Usage and Cost Management for Enterprise Clouds, -Fabrice Brazier, Amysta
  • 16:00-16:45 TBD
  • 16:45 – 17:30 Lightning talks from the audience

17:30-18:00 “Apero”

Sponsor: The event is sponsored by hepia, http://hepia.hesge.ch/

More information http://bacdgeneve.eventbrite.com/

 

 

About the European Cloud Partnership

18. August 2013 / / 0 Comments

From Report from the European Cloud Partnership Steering Board meeting of 4 July 2013 in Tallinn, 12 August 2013: “On 27 September 2012 the Commission adopted the European Cloud Strategy in the form of a Communication entitled “Unleashing the Potential of Cloud Computing in Europe”, in which it announced the intention to set up a European Cloud Partnership (ECP). Under the guidance of the Steering Board, the ECP brings together public authorities and industry consortia to advance the objectives of the Strategy towards a digital single market for cloud computing. On the 4th of July 2013, the ECP organised its second full Steering Board meeting in Tallinn.” The full report can be downloaded here. Report European Cloud Partnership Steering Board Meeting July 2013

Some thoughts on the two topics discussed:

PRISM: No big surprise to see that on the agenda. Hope is that  a high-profile activity like the ECP is not engaging in the just too frequent FUD-type of discussions but will support their strategy and implementation with solid social and technology research.

Cloud Standards: From the report “There is a need to identify minimal standards, based on existing best practices. These should focus on public sector needs, but the private sector is free to adopt these if it sees a benefit to doing so. Past experiences with the GSM standards are recalled, where a strong and forced EU level standardisation push made the EU a global leader in mobile technology.”  –  To draw a line between GSM and Cloud Computing looks just too typical for the European ICT sector, which is mostly known for their Telco incumbents. It would be interesting to learn more about the actual motivations behind this bold statement. So far, the Cloud Computing sector proves that standards are not needed. Also, since this statement is from a Telefonica representative, this needs to be viewed in the context of Telco standardization efforts beyond communication systems, WAC, GSMA, Parlay/Parlay-X, RCSe to name a few, all of which still have to prove real impact on the Internet.

Cloud for Europe: Is this any connected to the FI-PPP, and most importantly FI-WARE? Or the EGI Federated Cloud? The document refers to a presentation of Helix Nebula but given the fact that Cloud For Europe is a new project (a large one, IP with 20+ partners from 11 EU countries), one risk fragmentation across the meanwhile many different European Cloud research and development activities.

Dell visiting ZHAW ICCLAB

2. August 2013 / / 0 Comments

ICCLAB is often kind to  organise and host discussions with key professors from academy and players from the industry.

Last 18th of July, Alba Julio and Montserrat Pellicer from Dell –  Enterprise Solutions & Networking visited us for an open discussion on Software Defined Network (SDN) technologies. Most of researchers were attending from ICCLAB.

The event, of about two hours, was dedicated to introduce respective activities and solutions on SDN, in particular for the cloud infrastructures. Due to the background of participants, on technologies for the network, some time was also dedicated to review how the introduction of SDN / OpenFlow is evolving or progressing with different success in the cloud and in the public network.

Dell
After a briefing on his technical background and career, Julio illustrated the strategy of Dell about SDN and the solutions going to be offered to the market. This are solutions for Data Center cluster infrastructures which are already introduced in some large customer installations.

ICCLAB is currently involved in studies of SDN based on Openflow solutions as also reported in other blogs .  Some of the OpenStack Cluster solutions can be deployed easily with a SDN architecture for the ICCLAB internal network infrastructure and data center test environments.

The second part of the meeting was dedicated to review possible forms of future collaborations. Concerning collaborations in EU research projects, Thomas Bohnert was so kind to introduce the Future Internet Public Partnership Programme (FI PPP) as one of the key element for funding in many ICT sectors.   It will be further evaluated possible participation to FI PPP and other programmes (H2020) together with common participation to scientific programme and workshops.

Capture dell

Hardware Extension for Ceilometer

31. July 2013 / / 0 Comments

Ceilometer Introduction

Ceilometer is a monitoring tool for OpenStack cloud environments. In the next OpenStack release called Havana it will take part as a core component. However, Ceilometer is also available for the OpenStack releases Folsom and Grizzly. Currently Ceilometer offers only data of the OpenStack core components and the virtual machines of the cloud. For this reason the ICCLab decided to extend Ceilometer in a way that it is possible to collect data from hardware devices as well.

Ceilometer Extension – Concept

The collection of the data from the hardware devices should be independent and expandable. Therefore, a new Ceilometer agent with a modular structure is needed. We call this agent Hardware Agent. In the picture below the conceptual architecture is shown.

conceptual architecture

Conceptual Architecture Ceilometer Hardware Extension

As the Hardware Agent is part of Ceilometer it is installed nearly on every physical server. The Hardware Agent should be able to poll the data from various sources like IPMI, SMART or SNMP through Inspectors on different devices. This allows the Hardware Agent to get data from devices like switches or router.
It should be possible to deactivate each of these sources globally or per host. Which data will be extracted of the source should also be configurable globally or per host. The structured data is stored in Pollsters.
The Hardware Agent sends the collected data to the Ceilometer Event Bus which is in general a rabbit message queue. The central Ceilometer Collector takes the messages and stores it on a database. Through the Ceilometer API the data could be read by other systems like a billing and rating system or a graphical depiction.

Ceilometer Extension – Configuration Example

The configuration of the Hardware Agent allows the administrator to deactivate Pollsters and Inspectors globally or per device/host. The host settings take only place when no global settings are set.
To access the sources it might be necessary to set additional information like username or password. This configuration could be set globally or per host. If there is no host configuration the Hardware Agent takes the global configuration. If none of both configurations are set the inspector takes standard values to access the sources.

Configuration Sequence

Configuration Sequence of the Hardware Agent

These configurations could be set in /etc/ceilometer/hardware-agent.conf in this way:

disabled_hardware_pollsters=network
disabled_hardware_inspectors=ipmi
hardware_inspector_configurations = {“snmp” :
{“securityName”: “public”, “port”: 161}}

hardware_hosts={“10.0.0.1” :
{“disabled_pollsters”: [“cpu”],
“disabled_inspectors”: [“smart”],
“inspector_configurations”:
{“snmp” : {“port”: 163}}},
“10.0.0.2” :{…}}

Ceilometer Extension – Status and Prospect

With the programmed extension it is possible to get data of CPU (1,5 and 15 minutes usage in %), network (incoming/outcoming traffic in bytes, number of errors) storage(used/total space in bytes) and memory(used/total space in bytes) from any devices over SNMP. With new Inspectors it is imaginable to get more data of new sources like IPMI or SMART.
The base of the Ceilometer extension is currently being reviewed by other Ceilometer programmers (Review). If the review succeeds the extension take place in the Havana release of OpenStack in October 2013.

30th Birthday of the Swiss Informatics Society

12. July 2013 / / 0 Comments

30th birthday of the Swiss Informatics Society

The 30th birthday of the Swiss Informatics Society (SI), held on Tue 25 June  in Fribourg CH, concluded successfully with more then 200 participants who globally have attended the thematic workshops in the morning, the inaugural Meeting of the Swiss AIS Chapter and the plenary in the afternoon.

We post hereafter relevant topics on the Cloud Computing workshop, moderated by ZHAW ICCLAB,  and the award ceremony.

Workshop: Cloud Computing in Switzerland

Cloud Computing is transforming the IT industry, and this concerns a high-tech country like Switzerland in particular. The resulting potentials and risks need to be well understood in order to be able to fully leverage the technical as well as economical advantages. This workshop  provided an overview of current technological and economical trends with a particular focus on Switzerland and its Federal Cloud Computing strategy

8:45 – 9:00  Intro by Christof Marti (ZHAW)
Workshop introduction, goals and activities on Cloud Computing at ZHAW.

The Cloud Computing Special Interest Group (SIG), whose formation is coordinated by ZHAW ICCLAB, was introduced with its overall goals identified  to stimulate the knowledge, implementation and development of Cloud Computing in Industry, Research, SMEs and Education. The Kick-Off meeting is foreseen in September (watch si-cc-sig or linkedin group for more details ).  Further information were presented on the InIT Cloud Computing Lab (ICCLAB),  Research Lab dedicated to Cloud Computing in the focus area of Service Engineering encompassing important research themes and cloud initiatives like: Automation, Interoperability, Dependability, SDN for Clouds, Monitoring, Rating, Charging, Billing and Future Internet platforms.

9:00-09:20  Peter Kunszt  (SystemsX)
Cloud computing services for research – first steps and recommendations

The view of the scientific community on technological trends and the opportunities offered by Cloud Computing infrastructures.  Interesting start of the workshop by the Project leader of SyBIT (SystemsX.ch Biology IT: SyBIT) with overview of possible cloud services for science and education, recommendation concerning commercial vs. selfmade clouds and possible pricing & billing models for science .

9:20-09:40 Markus Brunner (Swisscom)
Cloud/SDN in Service Provider Networks

Markus illustrated “why a new network architecture” with feature comparision of aging network technology (static) and current trend (dynamic) on global needs like cost effectiveness, agility and service oriented. The proposal was to  look at new infrastructures based on SDN (Software Defined Network) and NFV (Network Function Virtualisation). NFV is concerned with porting network or telecommunications applications, that today typically run on dedicated and specialized hardware platforms, to virtualized Cloud platforms. Some basic architectures were discussed and interplay of NFV-SDN.   The presentation concluded with analysis of challenges for Cloud technologies today for communication oriented applications like: Real-time, Security, Predictable performance, Fault Management in Virtualized Systems and fixed /  mobile differences.

9:40-10:00  Sergio Maffioletti (University of Zurich)
A roadmap for an Academic Cloud 

“The view of the scientific community on how cloud technology could be used as a foundation for building a national research support infrastructure”. Interesting and innovative presentation made by Sergio starting from the “why and what’s wrong” analysis through the initiatives in places (new platforms, cloud utilisation and long tem competitiveness objectives). The presentation also made an overview of how this is implemented with National Research Infrastructure program (the Swiss Academic Compute  Cloud project) and innovative management systems (a mechanism to collect community requirements and implementing technical services and solution ).  The presentation concluded on the objectives and targets like: inter-operate, intra/inter access to institutional infrastructure, cloud enabled,   research clustering and national computational resources.

10:00-10:20 Michèal Higgins  (CloudSigma) – remote
CloudSigma and the Challenges of Big Science in the Cloud

Switzerland based CloudSigma is a pure-cloud IaaS service provider, offering highly-available flexible enterprise-class cloud servers in Europe and the U.S. It offers innovative services like all SSD storage, high performance solutions and firewall/VPN services. Helping building the a federated cloud platform (Helix Nebula) that addresses the needs of big science, CloudSigma sees the biggest challenges and values to have huge data-sets available close to the computing instances. As a conclusion CloudSigmas offers the Science community to store common big data sets for free close to their compute instances reducing the cost and time to transfer the data.

         10:20-10:40 Muharem Hrnjadovic (RackSpace)

An overview of key capabilities of cloud based infrastructures like OpenStack and challenging scenarios were presented during this session.

10:40-10:45 All
Q&A session

Swiss Informatics Competition 2013

Aside from speakers and panel discussions, captivating student projects (Bachelors &  Masters in Computer Science), from Universities and High Schools Specialty, have been introduced  to illustrate the diversity of computing technologies. Selected projects by team of experts have been also awarded. The details on the student projects are available here.

 Some photos taken from the cloud computing workshop, the plenary and ending awards:

Capture33 IMG_20130625_174341_stitch IMG_20130625_174455 IMG_20130625_174733 IMG_20130625_180000Foto 5Foto 3

Foto 2 Foto 1

Events: 30th birthday of the Swiss Informatics Society SI today at the HES-SO Fribourg.

25. June 2013 / / 0 Comments

As announced in previous posts, we report below the agenda of the  Cloud Computing in Switzerland workshop, chaired by ICCLab  from 8.45 AM to 10.45 AM today at the 30th birthday of the Swiss Informatics Society SI – the HES-SO Fribourg.

8:45 – 9:00  Intro by Christof Marti (ZHAW)

Workshop introduction, goals and activities on Cloud Computing at ZHAW.

9:00-09:20  Peter Kunszt  (Systemsx) 

The view of the scientific community on technological trends and the opportunities offered by Cloud Computing infrastructures.

“Cloud computing services for research – first steps and recommendations”

9:20-09:40 Markus Brunner (Swisscom)

The view of the operators on how cloud computing is transforming the ecosystem and related risks & challenges.

9:40-10:00  Sergio Maffioletti (University of Zurich) 

The view of the scientific community on how cloud technology could be used as a foundation for building a national research support infrastructure.

“Roadmap for an Open Cloud Academic Research Infrastructure”

10:00-10:20 Michèal Higgins  (CloudSigma) - remote

The view of the industry on how cloud computing is transforming the ecosystem and related risks & challenges.

“CloudSigma and the Challenges of Big Science in the Cloud”

10:20-10:40 Muharem Hrnjadovic (RackSpace)

An overview of key capabilities of cloud based infrastructures like OpenStack and challenging scenarios.

10:40-10:45 All

Q&A session

 

Upcoming Events: 30th birthday of the Swiss Informatics Society SI on Tuesday, 25.06.2013 at the HES-SO Fribourg.

24. June 2013 / / 0 Comments

header_s_i_tmb

The SI represents the computer science profession in Switzerland: professionals with a university degree or equivalent qualification, educational and research institutes, and companies that contribute to computer science. It networks its members and represents their interests in politics, education, business and research.

The 30th birthday of the Swiss Informatics Society will be holding a celebration event this Tuesday () at HES-SO in Fribourg. The programme is available here.

Including the inaugural Meeting of the Swiss AIS Chapter, from 8.45 AM to 10.45 AM there will be six parallel workshops: Green IT, Open Government Data, Cloud Computing in CH, Usability in der Praxis and Entertainment Computing.

The Cloud Computing in CH workshop is chaired by ICCLab and it will cover the following track theme:

Cloud Computing is transforming the IT industry, and this concerns a high-tech country like Switzerland in particular. The resulting potentials and risks need to be well understood in order to be able to fully leverage the technical as well as economical advantages. This workshop will provide an overview of current technological and economical trends with a particular focus on Switzerland and its currently released Federal Cloud Computing strategy.

The speakers will be: Christof Marti (ZHAW, moderator),  Peter Kunszt  (Systemsx), Markus Brunner (Swisscom), Sergio Maffioletti (University of Zurich), Michèal Higgins  (CloudSigma) and  Muharem Hrnjadovic (RackSpace).

Final agenda of this workshop will be posted  soon.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Future trends and technologies in Mobile and Internet communications @ CFIC 2013

17. May 2013 / / 0 Comments

Future trends of Mobile and Internet Communications are revealed at the Conference on Future Internet Communications 2013 in Coimbra, Portugal. The many different speeches and talks show that Cloud Computing could play a major role in future Mobile Communication networks.

Alexander Sayenko explains future trends in 3GPP standardization.

Alexander Sayenko explains future trends in 3GPP standardization.

The first keynote speech of the Conference was held by Alexander Sayenko, researcher at Nokia Siemens Networks, where he is responsible for standardization activities of the 3GPP-specification. In his keynote speech he presented the new HetNet multicarrier solution for the enhancement of current mobile communication traffic. While mobile communication traffic is expected to grow exponentially for the next decade, very diverse requirements concerning reliability and mobility of IT services offer a major challenge to the telecommunication industry. In order to be able to handle the growing mobile traffic, widening the available radio spectrum breadth and enhancing spectral efficiency as well as offloading of communication data to clusters of mobile base stations should enhance capacity of current mobile networks. HetNet offers a solution to enhance the radio spectrum and use the radio spectrum more efficiently by meshing up multiple heterogenous access networks. The future trend in mobile communication is going towards managing heterogeneous network infrastructures since the new standards like LTE and HSPA+ are still not used broadly and will not likely replace older technologies as fast as expected by the mobile end users. While the number of mobile devices and applications grows rapidly, changes in the infrastructure of mobile communication providers are performed much more slowly. New standards in mobile communications are a necessity in order to avoid a situation where the network infrastructure becomes a bottleneck to the mobile communication market.

Bottleneck: low efficiency of current access networks

The message is clear: mobile networks should be used more efficiently. An efficiency gain could be provided by the use of Cloud Computing for mobile networks. Andreas Kassler, researcher at Karlstads University in Sweden, showed CloudMAC – a new approach on how to allow location-independent routing of mobile devices in Wireless networks without introducing additional routing protocol overhead like e. g. in the Mobile IP protocol. The solution is to source the routing logic from Wireless Termination Endpoints into a virtualized infrastructure like e. g. an OpenStack cloud. Such an approach shows that Cloud Computing could become very important for the development of more efficient mobile networks. Therefore projects like e. g. the Mobile Cloud Network at ICCLab can make mobile communication ready for the challenges of the next decade.

ICCLab: enhance Quality of Cloud Services

The ICCLab had also a chance to present the benefits of Cloud Services for future Internet communications. Konstantin Benz, researcher at ICCLab, presented different technologies for OpenStack which should enable High Availability. He also showed how the Chaos Monkey tool could be transformed in a test framework which can add HA readiness of OpenStack architectures. The ongoing research about Cloud Automation, Cloud Dependability, Cloud Interoperability, Cloud Monitoring and Cloud Performance at ICCLab improves the overall quality of Cloud Computing as a service. Therefore Cloud Computing offered by ICCLab is able

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