Service Engineering (ICCLab & SPLab)

A Blog of the ZHAW Zurich University of Applied Sciences

Category: News (page 3 of 6)

Campus Party – The O2 London 3-6 September 2013

4. September 2013 / / 0 Comments

Campus Party is an annual week long, 24-hours-a-day technology festival where thousands of “Campuseros” (hackers, developers, gamers and technophiles), equipped with laptops, camp on-site and immerse themselves in a truly unique environment.

It is  the biggest electronic entertainment event in the world which unites the brightest young minds in technology and science under the idea that “the Internet is not a network of computers, it’s a network of people.”

The event of this year is strongly supported by the EU Commission (see photos) with the participation of  FI PPP  FI-WARE project (ZHAW ICCLAB is a partner)  challenges that will be launched to promote the exposure, dissemination, and possible take-up of the FI-WARE technologies. All big names from the business sectors and gaming are present as well with respective platforms.

FI-WARE will offer technology  building blocks ( Generic Enablers ) providing certain functionalities that can be used by a large set of applications and developers at the Campus Party. Examples are cloud hosting, big data analysis, location software, Complex Event Processing, Publish/Subscribe Broker, Marketplace, IoT Things Management, Security Monitoring, Identity Management, etc. These will be made available via the Open Innovation Lab.
Yesterday the workshop on IoT technologies actracted many young developers at the FI-WARE stand to receive the IoT kit which is necessary to develop IoT applications for the contest. Today ICCLAB will contribute to the FI-WARE workshop “Advancing Web User Interfaces” – 16:00 – 18:00 – Using FI-WARE Generic Enablers (GEs), you can create fun applications and participate in the challenges. The  overview will teach how to perform advanced multimedia stream processing on GEs .
All is very very interesting here with many exibitions on: 3D scanners and printers, augmented reality,  games and brain controlled demos.
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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.

New ICCLab Testbed at Equinix Datacenter

30. July 2013 / / 0 Comments

The ICCLab has now a new testbed for their work/research in the Cloud-Computing field at no other location than the datacenters of Equinix – one of our collaboration partners and generous donor of the rackspace – in Zurich.
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ICCLab 2013 Summer School on Cloud Computing

2. July 2013 / / 1 Comment

The 2013 Summer School on Cloud Computing is on.

From the 1st of July to the 26th, students from the Grand Valley State University as well as Zurich University of Applied Sciences will spent two weeks at each university, first stint at ZHAW and second at GVSU, enrolled into a Cloud Computing Summer School.

GVSU has entered into international-education partnerships with the Zurich University of Applied Sciences in Switzerland in June 2012. The partnerships encompass faculty, staff and student exchanges and the 2013 Summer School on Cloud Computing is a major instance of this partnership.

Students from both universities are offered a comprehensive Cloud Computing education packaged, based on a carefully chosen set of lectures and labs. Classes on latest Cloud Computing technology, e.g. OpenStack, Software Defined Networks, Cloud Performance, Cloud Automation, CloudFoundry, are complemented with the highlight, namely a lecture and lab provided by CloudSigma’s Michael Higgins, Head of Enterprise Architecture Solutions and a visit in a Swiss data center.

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All Cloud Computing lectures are given by research and domain experts of the ICCLab, see below.

  • CC-0 Cloud Computing Concepts, Thomas
  • CC-1 Introduction to IaaS and CloudSigma’s Cloud, Michael Higgins/CloudSigma
  • CC-2 Introduction to OpenStack, Irena and Piyush
  • CC-3 Introduction to PaaS, Christof
  • CC-4 Cloud Automation, Andy
  • CC-5 Cloud Networking, Philipp and Sandro
  • CC-6 Hadoop (BigData Analysis), Christof
  • CC-7 Performance & High Availability Lecture, Daniele and Konstantin

FluidCloud presented at USENIX

26. June 2013 / / 0 Comments

The work on cloud service relocation that is being investigated by the ICCLab was presented at USENIX HotCloud13. In FluidCloud we ask the key question of

“How to intrinsically enable and fully automate relocation of service instances between clouds?“

and present an architecture to realise service relocation. Below you can have a look at the presentation (PDF here) and the paper itself (and eventually a video of the talk) is available at the HotCloud13 proceedings’ site.

Open Cloud Day 2013, hosted by Zurich University of Applied Sciences

10. June 2013 / / 0 Comments

Open Cloud Day 2013

The ICCLab here in ZHAW will be co-organising the Open Cloud Day 2013: 11th June 2013 here in Winterthur. /ch/open understands the importance of Cloud Computing, as does the ICCLab. To get the full power of clouds in the view of /ch/open these clouds should be open according of the principles open cloud initiative.  The goal is to foster open clouds and interoperability of clouds. Especially taking into account the requirements of public administrations and large as well as small and medium-sized businesses. In this conference concrete solutions and stacks will be discussed. At least one of the afternoon tracks will explicitly be technical. Another key focus area is in the creation of simple to use and open source GovClouds.

Conference link :  http://www.ch-open.ch/events/aktuelle-events/open-cloud-day-2013/

Overall Programme

Tracks

Venue

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

ICCLab will host the 5th European Future Internet Summit in 2014

11. May 2013 / / 0 Comments

The 4th European Future Internet Summit is coming up and features a talk by Thomas M. Bohnert on Cloud Computing and the Future Internet. This is meanwhile the third invited talk by our lab to this event series.47617_170796792959021_6005876_n

We are therefore particulary proud to have the honor to host the 5th European Future Internet Summit the 5th and 6th June 2014 in Winterthur.

DRBD-Test environment for Vagrant available

2. May 2013 / / 0 Comments

There is always room to test different HA technologies in a simulated VM environment. At ICCLab we have created such a DRBD test environment for PostgreSQL databases. This environment is now available on Github.

The test environment installation uses Vagrant as tool to install VMs, Virtualbox as VM runtime environment and Puppet as VM configurator. It includes a Vagrant installation script (usually called a “Vagrantfile”) which sets up two virtual machines which run a clustered highly available PostgreSQL database.

In order to use the environment, you have to download it and then run the Vagrant installation script. The Vagrant installation script of the test environment essentially does the following things:

  • It creates two virtual machines with 1 GB RAM, one 80 GB harddrive and an extra 5 GB harddrive (which is used as DRBD device).
  • It creates an SSH tunnel between the two VM nodes which is used for DRBD synchronization.
  • It installs, configures and runs the DRBD device on both machines.
  • It installs, configures and runs Corosync and Pacemaker on both machines.
  • It creates a distributed PostgreSQL  database which runs on the DRBD device and which is managed by the Corosync/Pacemaker software.

This environment can easily be installed and then be used for testing of the DRBD technology. It can be downloaded from the following Github repository:

https://github.com/kobe6661/dependability_test_fw.git

Installation instructions can be found here.

ICCLab @ Swiss Academic Cloud Computing Experience

29. April 2013 / / 0 Comments

We presented at the Swiss Academic Cloud Computing Experience conference. Below are the slides as presented (or you can grab the PDF here).

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