Category: Open Source (page 1 of 4)

BOSH Release for the Ceph Object Storage Broker Now Available

by Omar Mahdi Kais

After announcing the broker sometime ago, we immediately started working to create a BOSH release for the broker and provide users with maximum freedom in how they want to deploy the broker and where they want to use it.

We wanted to ensure that the broker remains very simple to deploy, while simultaneously remaining easily configurable. In addition, since we are deploying on BOSH we wanted to handle as many dependencies as possible.

To accomplish these goals, we moved all service and plan configuration inside the broker’s deployment manifest, which we made sure to keep as simple as possible. Along with this, we also compile the source code on BOSH when deploying so that the user isn’t required to have Go installed if he wants to use the latest source code.

A simple deployment script is also provided so that time from repository clone to production is reduced to a minimum. This new repository along with complete documentation is now publicly available here, so feel free to use it and provide us with any feedback you might have.

Announcing the First Open Source Ceph Object Storage Service Broker

by Omar Mahdi Kais

We are happy to announce the public release of the first open source Ceph object storage service broker that is compliant with the Open Service Broker API V2, now available on GitHub.

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Sharing Our BOSH Utilities with the Community

by Omar Mahdi Kais

At the ICCLab we make extensive use of BOSH when working on our PaaS systems. We use it to deploy Cloud Foundry, different kinds of services and our own applications and tools on our internal OpenStack cloud.

While working with BOSH and the Cloud Foundry ecosystem in general, we create all kinds of different tools and small scripts to help make our lives easier, improve our workflows and speed up work.

From time to time, some of these small programs become an essential part of the work we do and improve our workflows in such a way that we think the wider Cloud Foundry community will also find them useful.

As such, we have created the bosh-utils GitHub repository to host all these utility programs that are small enough to not necessarily need their own repositories. So make sure to watch the repository for any new utilities we add and any new updates released.

The currently available utilities are:

  • Get-CredHub-Var
  • Get-Var

“Get-CredHub-Var” is a command line program that lets you very easily search and retrieve any secret stored on CredHub, with search results sorted and categorized by the BOSH deployment the secret is in. You can also make a timestamped backup by using the “backup” argument.

The “Get-Var” utility is similar to the “Get-CredHub-Var” except that instead of acting on CredHub, it searches for and retrieves secrets from local variable files that you specify.

More information and usage details for each is available on the repository. Also please feel free to give us your feedback, open issues or make pull requests. We are very happy to have community engagement and contribution.

Snafu – The Swiss Army Knife of Serverless Computing

by Josef Spillner

The Service Prototyping Lab at Zurich University of Applied Sciences is committed to advancing the state of technology for bringing applications to the cloud, for the benefit of the society of large in general and of the local industry in particular. This obliges us to closely monitor industrial trends along with academic advances. A hot topic currently found in both is the higher-PaaS-level service class of FaaS, or Function-as-a-Service, which coincides with the marketing term Serverless Computing. We have already contributed analytical work on finding the limits and possibilities of today’s FaaS systems (preprint), and engineering work on translating legacy monolithic code into fine-grained functions (preprint). It was only a matter of time until the limits in both commercially operated FaaS services and open-source FaaS prototypes became too severe for our work. Hence, after a careful analysis of what is available, we decided to come up with an alternative FaaS host process design. The design led to an architecture, and the architecture eventually to an implementation called Snafu. This post presents Snafu and positions it as Swiss Army Knife for situations in which functions should be prototyped, tested or hosted.

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Openstack checkpointing is simplified

by Josef Spillner

At ICCLab, we have recently updated the Openstack OVA onboarding tool to include an exporting functionality that can help operators migrate and checkpoint individual VMs. Furthermore, researchers can now export VMs to their local environments, even use them offline, and at any time bring them back to the cloud using the same tool.

The OpenStack OVA onboarding tool automatically transforms selected virtual machines into downloadable VMDK images. Virtual machines and their metadata are fetched from OpenStack’s Nova service, and made packed as OVA file. The tool offers a GUI integration with OpenStack’s Horizon Dashboard, but can be also deployed separately.

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Integration of Openstack OVA importing tool to Horizon

by Josef Spillner

ICCLab is announcing an integration of the Openstack OVA onboarding tool into OpenStack’s Horizon dashboard. To deploy the OVA file to Openstack all  images are extracted from the file and  uploaded to  the Openstack cluster, all necessary file format transformations are automatically performed, glance images get created and the tool creates a heat stack out of them. As we mentioned a couple of weeks ago, uploading your local VMs into OpenStack was never easier.

screenshot-from-2016-10-14-14-31-10

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push2cloud – Deploy complex microservice applications in style

push2cloud logo1 dark squareCloud Platforms allow development teams to bring application to production very fast.
In Cloud Foundry a simple ‘cf push’ can be used to deploy your application and bind it to the required services. This works incredibly well for small applications. But as the trend in Cloud Native Applications is going towards microservice architectures, which easily can grow to a large number of decoupled components, it is hard to keep the overview of all the applications and dependencies. It also can get cumbersome and expensive to maintain the deployment scripts and configuration of the applications and very often deployments will get slow and unreliable.

When dorma+kaba was developing exivo, their new trusted, on-demand access control solution for small enterprises, they where exactly facing these challenges, because they had to run and maintain more than 70 apps and 60 services  on the Swisscom Application Cloud. Continue reading

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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Cloud Orchestration: Hurtle Released

We are proud to announce that the ICCLab has released Hurtle!

Hurtle logo Hurtle

 

Hurtle is a result of the ICCLab’s Cloud Orchestration Initiative.

What is hurtle?

With Hurtle, you automate the life-cycle management of any number of service instances in the cloud, from deployment of resources all the way to configuration and runtime management (e.g., scaling) of each instance. Our motivation is that software vendors often face questions such as “How can I easily provision and manage new instances of the service I offer for each new customer?”, this is what Hurtle aims to solve.

In short, Hurtle lets you:

offer your software as a service i.e. “hurtle it!”

In Hurtle terms, a service represents an abstract functionality that, in order to be performed, requires a set of resources, such as virtual machines or storage volumes, and an orchestrator which describes what has to be done at each step of a service lifecycle.
A “service instance” is the concrete instantiation of a service functionality with its associated set of concrete resources and service endpoints.

On top of this, Hurtle has been designed since its inception to support service composition, so that you can design complex services by (recursively!) composing simple ones.

Hurtle’s functionality revolves around the idea of services as distributed systems composed of multiple sub-applications, so the services offered are also ones that can be designed with the cloud in mind, based on the cloud-native application research of the ICCLab.

What does it mean to offer software as a service?

A bit of history first. Traditionally software has been ran locally, then was centralised and shared through intra-nets. All of this was still on company-specific infrastructure. This made hosting, provisioning and managing such software difficult and the full time job of many IT engineers and system administrators.

This quickly brought about the argument that IT in a SME or an enterprise was a cost centre that should be minimised and lead to outsourcing of such tasks to 3rd parties.

Now today with the ever growing acceptance and use of cloud computing the cost equation is again further reduced, but more interestingly, cloud computing reverses the trend of outsourcing operations to third parties if you consider the movement of devops.

In this new world organisations that create software don’t want nor need third parties to manage their software deployments. They have much of the tooling needed, developed in-house. If they don’t, yet still want to follow a devops approach they’ve quite an amount of work ahead of them.

It is in this scenario where hurtle can help!

What can hurtle do?

What will hurtle do?

  • More examples including the cloud native Zurmo implementation from ICCLab
  • Enhanced workload placement, dynamic policy-based
  • Support for docker-registry deployed containers
  • Runtime updates to service and resource topologies
  • CI and CD support
    • safe monitored dynamic service updates
  • TOSCA support
  • Support for VMware and CloudStack
  • User interface to visualise resource and services relationships
  • Additional external service endpoint protocol support

Want to know more?

Checkout: hurtle.it

Software-release “powdernote – Notes. Simplified.”

Today the ICCLab introduces a new way on how to interact with your notes.

http://icclab.github.io/powdernote/

What is powdernote?

Powdernote is a note-taking, cloud-based application for the terminal.

Why powdernote?

Because we never leave the terminal, not even to read our notes or create new ones.

This tool is for busy engineers, developers, power users, devops, …

Our target is to have an un-cluttered, distraction-free application to solve the simple task of taking notes and having them available everywhere (storage is on the cloud)!

Main functions

  • Create, edit, delete, print, tag notes
  • Search content
  • Browse versions of notes
  • Export/import to/from powdernote files
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