Implementación de una herramienta de productividad para el desarrollo y despliegue de aplicaciones

En la actualidad se está viviendo el auge del Cloud Computing (Computación en la Nube) y cada vez son más las empresas importantes en el sector de las Tecnologías de la Información que apuestan con fuerza por estos servicios. Por un lado, algunas ofrecen servicios, como Amazon y su sistema IaaS (Infrastructure as a Service) Amazon Web Services (AWS); por otro, algunas los utilizan, como ocurre en el caso de este proyecto, en el que Telefonica I+D hace uso de los servicios proporcionados por AWS para sus proyectos. Debido a este crecimiento en el uso de las aplicaciones distribuidas es importante tener en cuenta el papel que desempeñan los desarrolladores y administradores de sistemas que han de trabajar y mantener todas las máquinas remotas de uno o varios proyectos desde una única máquina local. El ayudar a realizar estas tareas de la forma más cómoda y automática posible es el objetivo principal de este proyecto. En concreto, el objetivo de este proyecto es el diseño y la implementación de una solución software que ayude a la productividad en el desarrollo y despliegue de aplicaciones en un conjunto de máquinas remotas desde una única máquina local, teniendo como base una prueba de concepto realizada anteriormente que prueba las funcionalidades más básicas de las librerías utilizadas para el desarrollo de la herramienta. A lo largo de este proyecto se han estudiado las diferentes alternativas que se encuentran en el mercado que ofrecen al menos parte de la soluci6n a los problemas abordados, pese a que los requisitos de la empresa indicaban que la herramienta debía implementarse de forma completa. Se estudió a fondo después la prueba de concepto de la que se partía para, con los conocimientos adquiridos sobre el tema, mejorarla cumpliendo los objetivos marcados. Tras el desarrollo y la implementaci6n completa de la herramienta se proponen posibles caminos a seguir en el futuro. ---ABSTRACT---Nowadays we are experiencing the rise of Cloud Computing and every day more and more important IT companies are betting hard for this kind of services. On one hand, some of these companies offer services such as Amazon IaaS (Infrastructure as a Service) system Amazon Web Services (AWS); on the other hand, some of them use these services, as in the case of this project, in which Telefonica I+D uses the services provided by AWS in their projects. Due this growth in the use of distributed applications it is important to consider the developers and system administrators' roles, who have to work and do the maintenance of all the remote machines from one or several projects from a single local machine. The main goal of this project is to help with these tasks making them as comfortable and automatically as possible. Specifically, the goal of this project is the design and implementation of a software solution that helps to achieve a better productivity in the development of applications on a set of remote machines from a single local machine, based on a proof of concept developed before, in which the basic functionality of the libraries used in this tool were tested. Throughout this project the different alternatives on the market that offer at least part of the solution to the problem addressed have been studied, although according to the requirements of the company, the tool should be implemented from scratch. After that, the basic proof of concept was thoroughly studied and improved with the knowledge acquired on the subject, fulfilling the marked goals. Once the development and full implementation of the tool is done, some ways of improvement for the future are suggested.

FIWARE Lab: managing resources and services in a cloud federation supporting future internet applications

Real-world experimentation facilities accelerate the development of Future Internet technologies and services, advance the market for smart infrastructures, and increase the effectiveness of business processes through the Internet. The federation of facilities fosters the experimentation and innovation with larger and more powerful environment, increases the number and variety of the offered services and brings forth possibilities for new experimentation scenarios. This paper introduces a management solution for cloud federation that automates service provisioning to the largest possible extent, relieves the developers from time-consuming configuration settings, and caters for real-time information of all information related to the whole lifecycle of the provisioned services. This is achieved by proposing solutions to achieve the seamless deployment of services across the federation and ability of services to span across different infrastructures of the federation, as well as monitoring of the resources and data which can be aggregated with a common structure, offered as an open ecosystem for innovation at the developers' disposal. This solution consists of several federation management tools and components that are part of the work on Cloud Federation conducted within XIFI project to build the federation of cloud infrastructures for the Future Internet Lab (FIWARE Lab). We present the design and implementation of the solution-concerned FIWARE Lab management tools and components that are deployed within a federation of 17 cloud infrastructures distributed across Europe.

Desarrollo de software sobre entornos PaaS: revisión general, nuevas perspectivas y desafíos para la ingeniería de software

El uso de la computación en la nube ofrece un nuevo paradigma que procura proporcionar servicios informáticos para los cuales no es necesario contar con grandes infraestructuras y sobre todo, con las complejidades de costos, seguridad y mantenimiento implícitas. Si bien se ha posicionado en los últimos años como una plataforma innovadora en el ámbito de la tecnología de consumo masivo y organizacional, también puede ser tópico de investigación importante en ciertas áreas de interés como el desarrollo de Software, presentando en ese campo, una serie de ventajas y retos estimulantes que pueden ser explorados. Este trabajo de investigación, sigue con dicho sentido, el objetivo de exponer la situación actual sobre el empleo de la computación en la nube como entorno de desarrollo de Software, sectorizando a través de su capa PaaS, el modelo conceptual de trabajo, las perspectivas recientes, problemas e implicaciones generales del uso de ésta como herramienta plausible en proyectos de desarrollo de Software. El análisis de los diferentes temas abordados, tiene la intención en general, de proporcionar información objetiva, crítica y cuantitativa sobre la concentración de la investigación relacionada a PaaS, así como un marco de interpretación reciente que aporte una perspectiva referencial para futuras investigaciones asociadas.---ABSTRACT---The use of cloud computing offers a new paradigm to provide computer services for which it is not necessary to have large infrastructure and especially with the complexities of cost, safety and maintenance implied. While it has positioned itself in recent years as an innovative platform in the field of technology and massive organizational consumption, can also be an important research topic in certain areas of interest including, the development of Software, presenting in this field, a series of advantages, disadvantages and stimulating challenges that can be explored. This research, following with that sense, try to present the current situation related to the use of cloud computing as a software development environment, through its sectorized PaaS layer, showing the conceptual working model, actual perspectives, problems and general implications of using this as a possible tool in Software development projects. The analysis of the different topics covered, intends in a general form, provide objective, critical and quantitative information about the concentration of research related to PaaS, and a recent interpretation framework to provide a referential perspective for future related researches.

A new paradigm: cloud agile manufacturing

Cloud Agile Manufacturing is a new paradigm proposed in this article. The main objective of Cloud Agile Manufacturing is to offer industrial production systems as a service. Thus users can access any functionality available in the cloud of manufacturing (process design, production, management, business integration, factories virtualization, etc.) without knowledge — or at least without having to be experts — in managing the required resources. The proposal takes advantage of many of the benefits that can offer technologies and models like: Business Process Management (BPM), Cloud Computing, Service Oriented Architectures (SOA) and Ontologies. To develop the proposal has been taken as a starting point the Semantic Industrial Machinery as a Service (SIMaaS) proposed in previous work. This proposal facilitates the effective integration of industrial machinery in a computing environment, offering it as a network service. The work also includes an analysis of the benefits and disadvantages of the proposal.

Cloud agile manufacturing

This paper proposes a new manufacturing paradigm, we call Cloud Agile Manufacturing, and whose principal objective is to offer industrial production systems as a service. Thus users can access any functionality available in the cloud of manufacturing (process design, production, management, business integration, factories virtualization, etc.) without knowledge — or at least without having to be experts — in managing the required resources. The proposal takes advantage of many of the benefits that can offer technologies and models like: Business Process Management (BPM), Cloud Computing, Service Oriented Architectures (SOA) and Ontologies. To develop the proposal has been taken as a starting point the Semantic Industrial Machinery as a Service (SIMaaS) proposed in previous work. This proposal facilitates the effective integration of industrial machinery in a computing environment, offering it as a network service. The work also includes an analysis of the benefits and disadvantages of the proposal.

Opinión de los futuros maestros sobre el diseño y uso de murales multimedia como recurso didáctico

En este artículo se presenta una investigación que muestra la opinión de los futuros docentes sobre el diseño y creación de murales multimedia como recurso didáctico en el aula. Se ha recogido la opinión de alumnos de segundo curso del Grado de Maestro en Educación Infantil de la Universidad de Alicante mediante la aplicación de un cuestionario online centrado en las dimensiones: usabilidad, motivación, satisfacción en los resultados que genera, ventajas y desventajas de la herramienta, y uso e importancia del recurso. Los resultados ponen de relieve la importancia de la alfabetización tecnológica a partir de la creación de e-contenidos.

A utility model for volunteered service composition

Volunteered Service Composition (VSC) refers to the process of composing volunteered services and resources. These services are typically published to a pool of voluntary resources. The composition aims at satisfying some objectives (e.g. Utilizing storage and eliminating waste, sharing space and optimizing for energy, reducing computational cost etc.). In cases when a single volunteered service does not satisfy a request, VSC will be required. In this paper, we contribute to three approaches for composing volunteered services: these are exhaustive, naïve and utility-based search approach to VSC. The proposed new utility-based approach, for instance, is based on measuring the utility that each volunteered service can provide to each request and systematically selects the one with the highest utility. We found that the utility-based approach tend to be more effective and efficient when selecting services, while minimizing resource waste when compared to the other two approaches.

Cloud adoption:prioritizing obstacles and obstacles resolution tactics using AHP

The enormous potential of cloud computing for improved and cost-effective service has generated unprecedented interest in its adoption. However, a potential cloud user faces numerous risks regarding service requirements, cost implications of failure and uncertainty about cloud providers' ability to meet service level agreements. These risks hinder the adoption of cloud. We extend the work on goal-oriented requirements engineering (GORE) and obstacles for informing the adoption process. We argue that obstacles prioritisation and their resolution is core to mitigating risks in the adoption process. We propose a novel systematic method for prioritising obstacles and their resolution tactics using Analytical Hierarchy Process (AHP). We provide an example to demonstrate the applicability and effectiveness of the approach. To assess the AHP choice of the resolution tactics we support the method by stability and sensitivity analysis. Copyright 2014 ACM.

Scheduling medical application workloads on virtualized computing systems

This dissertation presents and evaluates a methodology for scheduling medical application workloads in virtualized computing environments. Such environments are being widely adopted by providers of "cloud computing" services. In the context of provisioning resources for medical applications, such environments allow users to deploy applications on distributed computing resources while keeping their data secure. Furthermore, higher level services that further abstract the infrastructure-related issues can be built on top of such infrastructures. For example, a medical imaging service can allow medical professionals to process their data in the cloud, easing them from the burden of having to deploy and manage these resources themselves. In this work, we focus on issues related to scheduling scientific workloads on virtualized environments. We build upon the knowledge base of traditional parallel job scheduling to address the specific case of medical applications while harnessing the benefits afforded by virtualization technology. To this end, we provide the following contributions: (1) An in-depth analysis of the execution characteristics of the target applications when run in virtualized environments. (2) A performance prediction methodology applicable to the target environment. (3) A scheduling algorithm that harnesses application knowledge and virtualization-related benefits to provide strong scheduling performance and quality of service guarantees. In the process of addressing these pertinent issues for our target user base (i.e. medical professionals and researchers), we provide insight that benefits a large community of scientific application users in industry and academia. Our execution time prediction and scheduling methodologies are implemented and evaluated on a real system running popular scientific applications. We find that we are able to predict the execution time of a number of these applications with an average error of 15%. Our scheduling methodology, which is tested with medical image processing workloads, is compared to that of two baseline scheduling solutions and we find that it outperforms them in terms of both the number of jobs processed and resource utilization by 20–30%, without violating any deadlines. We conclude that our solution is a viable approach to supporting the computational needs of medical users, even if the cloud computing paradigm is not widely adopted in its current form.

Cloud Stratus: uma plataforma de middleware para desenvolvimento de aplicações em nuvem

Cloud Computing is a paradigm that enables the access, in a simple and pervasive way, through the network, to shared and configurable computing resources. Such resources can be offered on demand to users in a pay-per-use model. With the advance of this paradigm, a single service offered by a cloud platform might not be enough to meet all the requirements of clients. Ergo, it is needed to compose services provided by different cloud platforms. However, current cloud platforms are not implemented using common standards, each one has its own APIs and development tools, which is a barrier for composing different services. In this context, the Cloud Integrator, a service-oriented middleware platform, provides an environment to facilitate the development and execution of multi-cloud applications. The applications are compositions of services, from different cloud platforms and, represented by abstract workflows. However, Cloud Integrator has some limitations, such as: (i) applications are locally executed; (ii) users cannot specify the application in terms of its inputs and outputs, and; (iii) experienced users cannot directly determine the concrete Web services that will perform the workflow. In order to deal with such limitations, this work proposes Cloud Stratus, a middleware platform that extends Cloud Integrator and offers different ways to specify an application: as an abstract workflow or a complete/partial execution flow. The platform enables the application deployment in cloud virtual machines, so that several users can access it through the Internet. It also supports the access and management of virtual machines in different cloud platforms and provides services monitoring mechanisms and assessment of QoS parameters. Cloud Stratus was validated through a case study that consists of an application that uses different services provided by different cloud platforms. Cloud Stratus was also evaluated through computing experiments that analyze the performance of its processes.

Design and Implementation of a Cloud Infrastructure for Distributed Scientific Calculation

Cloud computing enables independent end users and applications to share data and pooled resources, possibly located in geographically distributed Data Centers, in a fully transparent way. This need is particularly felt by scientific applications to exploit distributed resources in efficient and scalable way for the processing of big amount of data. This paper proposes an open so- lution to deploy a Platform as a service (PaaS) over a set of multi- site data centers by applying open source virtualization tools to facilitate operation among virtual machines while optimizing the usage of distributed resources. An experimental testbed is set up in Openstack environment to obtain evaluations with different types of TCP sample connections to demonstrate the functionality of the proposed solution and to obtain throughput measurements in relation to relevant design parameters.

The Importance of Proper Measurement for a Cloud Security Assurance Model

Winner of a best paper award.

Information Security in the Cloud: Should We be Using a Different Approach?

Postprint

Cumulon: Simplified Matrix-Based Data Analytics in the Cloud

Cumulon is a system aimed at simplifying the development and deployment of statistical analysis of big data in public clouds. Cumulon allows users to program in their familiar language of matrices and linear algebra, without worrying about how to map data and computation to specific hardware and cloud software platforms. Given user-specified requirements in terms of time, monetary cost, and risk tolerance, Cumulon automatically makes intelligent decisions on implementation alternatives, execution parameters, as well as hardware provisioning and configuration settings -- such as what type of machines and how many of them to acquire. Cumulon also supports clouds with auction-based markets: it effectively utilizes computing resources whose availability varies according to market conditions, and suggests best bidding strategies for them. Cumulon explores two alternative approaches toward supporting such markets, with different trade-offs between system and optimization complexity. Experimental study is conducted to show the efficiency of Cumulon's execution engine, as well as the optimizer's effectiveness in finding the optimal plan in the vast plan space.

Investigation into a best practice model for providing an integrated user experience with mobile cloud applications

Mobile Cloud Computing promises to overcome the physical limitations of mobile devices by executing demanding mobile applications on cloud infrastructure. In practice, implementing this paradigm is difficult; network disconnection often occurs, bandwidth may be limited, and a large power draw is required from the battery, resulting in a poor user experience. This thesis presents a mobile cloud middleware solution, Context Aware Mobile Cloud Services (CAMCS), which provides cloudbased services to mobile devices, in a disconnected fashion. An integrated user experience is delivered by designing for anticipated network disconnection, and low data transfer requirements. CAMCS achieves this by means of the Cloud Personal Assistant (CPA); each user of CAMCS is assigned their own CPA, which can complete user-assigned tasks, received as descriptions from the mobile device, by using existing cloud services. Service execution is personalised to the user's situation with contextual data, and task execution results are stored with the CPA until the user can connect with his/her mobile device to obtain the results. Requirements for an integrated user experience are outlined, along with the design and implementation of CAMCS. The operation of CAMCS and CPAs with cloud-based services is presented, specifically in terms of service description, discovery, and task execution. The use of contextual awareness to personalise service discovery and service consumption to the user's situation is also presented. Resource management by CAMCS is also studied, and compared with existing solutions. Additional application models that can be provided by CAMCS are also presented. Evaluation is performed with CAMCS deployed on the Amazon EC2 cloud. The resource usage of the CAMCS Client, running on Android-based mobile devices, is also evaluated. A user study with volunteers using CAMCS on their own mobile devices is also presented. Results show that CAMCS meets the requirements outlined for an integrated user experience.