Description
In this initiative we focus on bringing Platform as a Service (PaaS) to the ICCLab testbed, on top of OpenStack. We are investigating and evaluating all the requirements for running various open source PaaS solutions like Cloud Foundry (http://www.cloudfoundry.org), OpenShift (http://www.openshift.org) and Cloudify (http://www.cloudifysource.org) and extend the testbed for monitoring, rating, charging and billing on PaaS level.
Plattform as a Service (PaaS) is focusing on developers as customers by providing them a platform containing the whole technology stack to run applications and services supporting all the typical cloud characteristics like On-Demand Self-Service, Rapid Elasticity, Measured Service, Resource Pooling etc. Typically these platforms consist of:
- Runtime environments (Java, Ruby, Python, NodeJs, .Net, …),
- Frameworks (Spring, JEE, Rails, Django, … ) and
- Services like
- Datastores (SQL, NoSQL, Key-Value-Stores, File-/Object-Storage,…),
- Messaging (Queuing, PubSub, EventProcessing,…)
- Management Services (authentication, logging, monitoring,…)
Our full PaaS (mid-longterm) mission is described in the PaaS research theme page
Problem Statement
PaaS technologies and offerings are still in early stages. Lot of hype and movement in the market. Standards are not yet established. Lots of the open source tools like CloudFoundry and OpenShift are still in beta stages and not mature. Moving the responsibility for the operation of runtimes, frameworks and services to the cloud provider creates many new challenges. First of all the deployment and operation has to be totally automated and tooling for operation and management is needed. New parameters for monitoring and rating are required and new charging models to be developed and evaluated. Other challenges are the automated interfacing with the underlying infrastructure layer (in our case OpenStack), to provide and guarantee the requested performance and scalability. Last but not least we have to investigate how to extend the frameworks with new services and runtimes.
Articles and Info
There are a number of presentations about PaaS in general and CloudFoundry/BOSH specifically used in the ICCLab:
- Plattform as a Service: The future of Software Development
- Cloud Foundry on OpenStack at the 2nd Swiss OpenStack User Group meeting