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Report

Teaser, summary, work performed and final results

Periodic Reporting for period 1 - BASMATI (Cloud Brokerage Across Borders for Mobile Users and Applications)

Teaser

The explosion of the number of mobile apps that appear and we are using in our daily lives is unquestionable. Almost all of them are relying on some sort of web-based backend, usually in the form of a restful API or similar. The backend mobile services are commonly delivered...

Summary

The explosion of the number of mobile apps that appear and we are using in our daily lives is unquestionable. Almost all of them are relying on some sort of web-based backend, usually in the form of a restful API or similar. The backend mobile services are commonly delivered through cloud computing technologies that allow application providers to leverage on the cloud ability to adapt to the demand ultimately being a cost-effective solution. However, an inherent characteristic of mobile apps, that of mobility, combined with other application contextual characteristics (e.g. highly asymmetric load bursts) put a strain on the computing and storage infrastructure to compensate in terms of QoS whatever the network might lose.

A standard approach to resolve the problem and avoid violating the SLA objectives is the maintenance of resources to run mobile app services closer to the users’ physical location. However, this solution comes also at a cost. At a local scale, a high spatial density use of mobile services can reduce the efficiency or unreasonably increase the cost of the resource provision through scaling (Large events use case). At a global scale, the continuous maintenance of resources around the world poses serious questions about the cost-efficiency of such a solution (Mobile Virtual Desktop and TripBuilder use case).
To tackle those issues BASMATI resolves to the development of a platform that will be able to: a) support mobile app services and their context; b) manage the infrastructure to achieve cost-effectiveness; c) supporting federation at a cloud infrastructure level, and; d) intelligent offloading and brokering of tasks including edge resources.

The overall objectives of BASMATI can be summarized in the following:
- Mobile cloud services enablement and portability to exploit brokerage and offloading to cloud federations and / or other devices (i.e. device-to-device) based on application typology
- Situational knowledge acquisition and mobility patterns understanding providing the ground for real-time adaptations of federation and brokerage decisions
- Development, deployment and configuration of abstracted and integrated federated cloud environments based on multi-objective optimized federation logic
- Dynamic brokerage for placement and offloading through runtime adaptable deployment patterns of the brokerage platform
- Ultra-scalable hybrid infrastructure management for mobile heterogeneous resources and cloud federations
- Multi-provider and multi-tenancy functional and non-functional guarantees for mobile cloud services
- Effectiveness of BASMATI outcomes validated and communicated through three real-world scenarios from different application domains
- Exploitation, effectiveness and standardisation of BASMATI outcomes through tangible identified plans for a wide set of BASMATI technologies

Work performed

During the 1st year, BASMATI put emphasis in defining the offloading and federation scenarios that it is going to support. The criteria for prioritizing the multiple such scenarios were based upon application needs but also upon available resources within the project lifetime. As such the project aimed at developing tools that would allow the intelligent a) use of specialized devices and cloudlets at the edge of the computing and storage infrastructure brining about mobile services while being closer to the end user (thus alleviating network constraints), and; b) migrating services and data to cloud resources owned by different providers under different provision policies and business models. The consortium refers to the first case as “offloading” and to the second as “federation”, seeking mainly cost-effective approaches to implement them in the frame of the pilot scenarios.

Considering the application context in order to predict the required resources is within the center of the research work in BASMATI. The Knowledge extractor component, together with the Decision Maker ensure that all parameters are taken into account in order to estimate the resources needed for a task by a specific end user and under specific circumstances.

According to the BASMATI terminology, a cloud federation is a result of –primarily- a business agreement between resource providers (not necessarily resource owners like Amazon) who team up in order to make their resources available to other members of the federation at a cost. Thus, the implementation and use of a cloud federation needs to attain a plethora of –often conflicting- objectives. The Cloud Provider Management, the Federated Resource Broker, the Federation Data Management (including Federated SLAs) and -mainly- the Federation Business Logic are the primary components dealing with this goal.

Finally, the BASMATI consortium is focusing on promoting the Cloud Service Brokerage in the respective standardization bodies.

Final results

During the first year of the project, BASMATI has made significant progress in terms of developing the concept of Cloud Service Providers federation based on a clear business incentive that will potentially make a great impact on the IT economies of both EU and Korea. Furthermore, implementations of the use cases and partial integration of the BASMATI platform has demonstrated the feasibility of the endeavor. In what follows, we provide further details about the abovementioned topics to justify how the project has made progress in achieving impact on a business, scientific and social level.

In summary, impact was achieved through the following achievements
- Credible demonstrations based on crossborder business and/or societal applications of robust interoperable technologies for mobile applications on cloud platforms.
* Definition of cloud service providers federation
* Federation platform: ACE multicloud manager and BEAM formalism to define applications based on OASIS TOSCA

- Concrete implementations of interoperable solutions for Cloud resource brokerage technologies that are candidates for standardisation.
* Resource selection based on QoS: Federated resource broker, monitoring and SLA manager, Knowledge Extractor (for mapping application context to resource utilization) and Decision maker that deduces the problem to a MOO problem.

- Joint contributions to International Standardization and/or Forum activities.
* Apart from the current contributions to ITU, the consortium has submitted a joint proposal entitled: “Proposal of a general use case for cloud service customization in cloud service brokerage”, for the next meeting on July 2017.

- Improving innovation capacity and integration of new knowledge
* the BASMATI cloud provisioning model management platform will be published on Open Source under Apache 2 license providing support for the future Open Source community named “Fog Hopper”.
* Generated datasets are created from the use cases (user location data, semantic trajectories, resource utilization) will be released under ODC Open Database License (ODbL) (attribution & share-alike).

- Business Impact
* Initial market analysis of the current situation in Europe and Korea, aiming to allocate the niche for the solution proposed by the project.
* Individual partner exploitation plans in place

- Scientific impact
* 10 publications have been accepted: 9 for presentation and publication in international conference proceedings and 1 in a journal volume.

Website & more info

More info: http://www.basmati.cloud/.