MODAClouds

MODAClouds is a project partially funded by the Seventh Framework Programme for Research and Technological Development, sometimes abbreviated to FP7. It is a collaborative research project using public money and engaging partners from across the European Union including Imperial College London and Siemens. MODAClouds works in collaboration with existing research projects such as the Intelligent Community Forum and is a noteworthy example of a European research program designed to increase competition in the cloud services industry.
Summary
The goal of the MODAClouds project is to provide methods, a decision support system, an open source Integrated development environment (IDE) and run-time environment for the high-level design, early prototyping, semi-automatic code generation and automatic deployment of applications on multi-Clouds with guaranteed quality of service. It is hoped this will enable developers to specify independent Cloud-provider models enriched with quality parameters. These will then be implemented along with performing quality prediction, monitoring applications at run-time and optimising them based on the feedback. This is intended to fill the gap between design and run-time. In addition, MODAClouds will provide techniques for data mapping and synchronization among multiple Clouds, which is considered one of the key measures in developing reliable cloud services in the future.
The areas where the MODAClouds project intends to innovate beyond existing technology will include:
* Simplifying Cloud provider selection in favour of emerging European Cloud providers
* Avoiding the issue of vendor lock-in problems by supporting the development of Cloud-enabled Future Internet applications
* Providing quality assurance throughout the application life-cycle and supporting migration from Cloud to Cloud when needed.
Background
Conducting European research policies and implementing European research programmes is an obligation under the Amsterdam Treaty. With an increase in the need to create financial and energy efficiencies worldwide, Cloud Computing has emerged as an important Future Internet technology.
It has been suggested that that the contribution of €7 billion/year in European research funding in 2006 might help generate an increase in GDP of some €200 billion/year by the 2030s.
According to several international sources, the risk of technological lock-in is a major concern for European Cloud customers seeking to compete with established American providers such as Amazon.com and Google.
Cloud providers, in fact, offer proprietary solutions that force Cloud customers to decide, at the early stages of software development the design and deployment models to adopt (e.g., public vs hybrid Clouds) as well as the technology stack (e.g., Amazon Simple DB vs Google Bigtable).
Lack of past expertise in Cloud computing makes this a high-risk choice, especially for SMEs. This, if the target platform does not fulfil the original expectations, has potentially catastrophic business consequences. Thus, portability of applications and data between Clouds, as well as reversibility (moving applications and data from Cloud to non-Cloud environments) should be addressed.
Late binding to a specific target Cloud during the design process can decrease project failure risks increasing the trust in Clouds. This is especially important in the current economic climate, where failures may have serious financial consequences for a SME. There are several concerns when selecting a Cloud technology such as payment models, security, legal and contractual, quality and integration with the enterprises architecture and culture. However, at present only embryonic tools and decision support methods exists to support selecting and binding to a specific target Cloud, or taking a decision to move in case requirements or services change. Quality Assurance. Cloud performance can vary at any point in time. Elasticity may not ramp at desired speeds. Unavailability problems exist even when 99.9% up-time is advertised. Given the criticality of many business applications, analytical techniques are needed to predict quality of service and to reason on software systems properties at design-time, but also run-time mechanisms and policies able to provide end-to-end quality.
Objective
The tangible results the project is expected to deliver are:
* An IDE supporting the design and semi-automated deployment of applications to the Cloud and on multiple Clouds, as well as the early Quality of Service assessment of Cloud applications.
* Modelling languages and supporting tools for developing Cloud abstractions that are Cloud provider-independent and span across different layers of the Cloud stack.
* Run-time framework and high level policies for the run-time management of applications on Clouds and multi-Clouds enabling automatic migration of applications or of their components on different Clouds providing quality assurance.
* Novel mechanisms to close the loop between run-time and design time and adapt to changing requirements and context, offering QoS information to the decision making engine.
* A decision support system providing guidance in the selection of the right set of Clouds analysing trade-off between cost, reliability, risks and quality impacts.
* Models and methodologies for the evaluation of the impact of the Cloud adoption in Organisations improving trust in Cloud solutions.
* Demonstrators and evaluation of the projects results with industry relevant case studies.

Main Menu

See Also

Main Menu