NUBA

Research has started on the management of IaaS (Infrastructure as a Service) cloud computing environments for deploying Enterprise Services that will allow cloud infrastructures brokering from different providers to share resources among them, balancing load and achieving more stable, profitable and environmentally-friendly services.The NUBA project unites eight Spanish firms each with their own perspective and expertise, to solve the major challenges to implementing this vision.

NUBA research seeks to solve a common problem currently found in the nascent IaaS cloud industry. Should it be possible to send loads from one cloud to another?, Clouds will be able to balance loads among them for further optimization of hardware utilization rates. Much in the way that insurance companies themselves take out insurance policies on their larger policies with other insurers, reducing the total effect of that policy being claimed, professional cloud providers will reduce the risk of running out of capacity at peak moments. Likewise, private cloud users will be able to outsource to public clouds during consumption peaks in what is termed “cloudbursting”. Furthermore, it will facilitate a market for cloud resources. It will reduce the lock in of users to a given provider, a recognized barrier to its adoption. Moreover, specialized clouds could appear, with loads moving to these clouds when requiring these specific resources, introducing additional points of differentiation in a sector that faces the risk of becoming a commodity. It will  create an opportunity for cloud aggregators to act as a broker between diverse users and providers.

However, federating these environments is not without challenges, and it is on these that the NUBA project is focusing its efforts. Specific software needs to be written that can manage these cloud environments on a local level, and also on a federated level. To be feasible, the federation needs a large degree of automation, interoperability and development of common standards. Tools are required to manage the life cycle of the services provided, and the business requirements of the actors are a necessary consideration to include in these tools. Finally to ensure that the research outputs can be applied to real business situations, prototypes in a series of use cases will be developed and thoroughly tested.

In order to realize this vision, NUBA will define a complete reference architecture that will be approached from each of the three models of cloud operators active in the market: Cloud Providers, Cloud Aggregators and Service Providers. Cloud Providers provide and manage the virtualized infrastructure on which services are seamlessly deployed. They seek to provide guaranteed service levels on one hand, while optimizing and automating the assignation of local resources, to reduce costs and energy consumption. Their offering is infrastructure provided as utility computing. Cloud Aggregators provide and manage catalogues of resource types and global capacities upon a federated infrastructure. Ultimately a broker of resources, they will manage services, choosing the optimal cloud provider based on the requirements of the services and the profile of the cloud provider in terms of limitations, costs and guaranteed service level, and potentially even running a service across multiple cloud environments. Finally, Service Providers execute business applications on cloud environments and offer them to the client “as a service” through the Internet. Their strategy is based on simplifying and controlling the development of software to reduce operating costs and ultimately making it independent of the physical infrastructure which will provide them with the negotiating power to seek cheaper access to infrastructure as this is a major input cost. In addition they require tools to supervise and remotely manage their services on the cloud provider’s infrastructure, having the capability of controling the dynamic service escalability based on QoS and business objectives.

NUBA will provide new middleware components for the dynamic aggregation of heterogeneous cloud components according to business needs. Thes components will be generic and reusable so that they can be applied to different scenarios.

NUBA aims to provide a complete Open Source middleware stack that would be used by Cloud Providers and Cloud Aggregators for delivering IaaS cloud services, and by Service Providers to manage services. To do so, a special effort will be devoted to facilitate reusable components that could be instantiated and adapted at differents levels (service management, cloud federation and local cloud management) to operate public, private and hybrid cloud solutions, including the interoperability with commercial IaaS clouds.The team of researchers is led by Telefonica Investigación y Desarrollo, and supported by Atos Origin, Barcelona Supercomputing Centre, The Galician Supercomputing centre, the University of Complutense in Madrid, and three SMEs; Catón Sistemas Alternativas, Digital Bubble and Xeridia. It is part financed by the Spanish government through the Avanza programme.

The work started in July 2009 and will run until June 2013. The project is supported by the Cloud Technologies chapter of the Morfeo Community (http://cloudtechnologies.morfeo-project.org). For more information, visit the project website (http://nuba.morfeo-project.org) where interim results will be published regularly.