CloudWave: Agile Service Engineering for the Future Internet

The CloudWave project will deliver novel technologies and methods for developing SaaS solutions and for managing their operation and execution.


As cloud computing is taking hold, the challenges of fully realizing its potential become evident. First, cloud has long been seen as mere cost saver. Second, an outstanding problem with cloud applications is that due to their deployment scale and distribution, these applications are potentially prone to serious stability problems, even outages, as recently observed with leading service providers. These problems mainly arise since cloud applications are often designed with incomplete knowledge about their actual usage profile, delivery model and the reliability of the cloud infrastructure. This, in turn, may lead to unforeseen runtime situations, resource utilization inefficiencies, performance degradation, stability problems and even failures. These can result in loss of competitive advantage for service providers due to client's concerns about quality of service (QoS) and usage risks.

Various solutions have been proposed to alleviate the cloud quality of service problem. For the most part, cloud providers have focused on advancements in cloud infrastructure technologies. However, in spite of significant technological progress in the area of cloud infrastructure, current cloud computing platforms still fall short of delivering truly compelling end-to-end QoS. We believe that this gap is a fundamental consequence of both application-level and infrastructure-level deficiencies: applications are not designed to explore the distribution, characteristics, and dynamic behaviour of cloud infrastructure; and existing cloud technology stacks (such as OpenStack) do not provide concrete mechanisms to facilitate such cloud application development. Thus, we require new, holistic, cloud-specific engineering methods that facilitate design and delivery of reliable cloud services and that support their continuous adaptation to changing environment conditions and market requirements, speeding up innovation cycles. The CloudWave project is an aggressive research attempt to address this challenge by delivering novel technologies and methods for developing SaaS solutions and for managing their operation and execution.

CloudWave will tangibly deliver (1) an open architecture and standards-based reference implementation of an advanced cloud software stack, with novel capabilities for adaptation across all cloud layers; and (2) tools and methods for agile development of reliable and adaptable cloud services, facilitated by the new stack. Technologically, CloudWave will advance the state-of-art along three dimensions: Execution Analytics, Coordinated Adaptation, and Feedback-Driven Development. Using two industry case studies, we will demonstrate how the CloudWave technology supports emerging Future Internet services and provides high and quantifiable improvements in service delivery quality, productivity, reliability and cost.

Funding

Funded by: European Union (EU)

Type: Seventh Framework Programme (FP7/2007-2013)

Funding: apprx. 6.3 Mio. Euro (Total Funded Amount)

Duration: 11/2013 - 12/2016

Partners

  • IBM Israel
  • SAP AG
  • TELECOM ITALIA S.p.A
  • ATOS SPAIN SA
  • Cloudmore OÜ
  • Universität Duisburg-Essen
  • University Degli Studi di Messina
  • TECHNION - Israel Institute of Technology
  • University of Zurich
  • Intel

This project has received funding from the European Union's Seventh Framework Programme FP7/2007-2013 under grant agreement no. 610802.