Dependability Modeling: Testing Availability from an End User’s Perspective

In a former article we spoke about testing High Availability in OpenStack with the Chaos Monkey. While the Chaos Monkey is a great tool to test what happens if some system components fail, it does not reveal anything about the general strengths and weaknesses of different system architectures. In order to determine if an architecture with 2 redundant controller nodes and 2 compute nodes offers a higher availability level than an architecture with 3 compute nodes and only 1 controller node, a framework for testing different architectures is required. The “Dependability Modeling Framework” seems to be a great opportunity to evaluate different system architectures on their ability to achieve availability levels required by end users.






PaaS on OpenStack

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. […]


The core components of any HA strategy

In his excellent article in Linux Technical Review #04 Jens-Christoph Brendel proposes a new way how to implement High Availability (HA) in current IT architectures. According to Bendel, modern IT architectures continually gain in complexity. This fact makes it difficult to guarantee availability on a certain level. Nevertheless High Availability is not merely a competitional advantage: for many companies keeping availability levels above 99,999 % per year is a matter of existence. Therefore a few systematic steps should help in planning and implementing high availability in your IT environment. This article shows a possible strategy on how to plan High Availability in the Mobile Cloud environment.


OpenStack on SmartOS

SmartOS is an open source type 1 hypervisor platform based on Illumos, a descendant of OpenSolaris, and developed by Joyent. SmartOS is a live operating system, meaning that can be booted via PXE, USB or an ISO image, and runs entirely from memory, leaving the full space on the local disk to be used for virtual machines. This type of architecture makes SmartOS very secure, easy to upgrade and recover. Given its performances and reliability, in the context of the Mobile Cloud Networking project, SmartOS has been chosen to support telco-grade workloads and provide carrier-grade performances.