SeaClouds Project D7.4 Final Exploitation Plan
Project Acronym SeaClouds Project Title Seamless adaptive multi-cloud management of service- based applications Call identifier FP7-ICT-2012-10 Grant agreement no. Collaborative Project Start Date 1st October 2013 Ending Date 31st March 2016
Work Package WP7, Exploitation and Collaboration Due Date: M30 Submission Date: 30th March 2016 Version: 1.0 Status Draft Author(s): Ivan Febles (ATOS) Reviewer(s) Oliver Barreto Javier Cubo D7.4 Final Exploitation Plan 2
Dissemination Level Project co-funded by the European Commission within the Seventh Framework Programme PU Public PP Restricted to other programme participants (including the Commission) RE Restricted to a group specified by the consortium (including the Commission) CO Confidential, only for members of the consortium (including the Commission) X
Version History Version Date Comments, Changes, Status Authors, contributors, reviewers 0.1 22/03/2016 Initial draft Ivan Febles Andrea Turli Javier Cubo Francesco D´Andria 0.2 Reviewed document Elisabetta di Nitto Christian Tismer Antonio Brogi Oliver Barreto 1.0 30/03/2016 Final document Ivan Febles
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Table of Contents
List of figures ...... 4 List of acronyms ...... 4 Executive Summary ...... 5 1. Introduction ...... 6 2. SeaClouds: an update ...... 7 3. Exploitation methodology and approach ...... 8 3.1 Impact creation ...... 10 3.1.1 Impact on Research & Scientific community ...... 10 3.1.2 Market oriented impact ...... 13 3.2 Exploitation milestones ...... 14 The SeaClouds - Apache Brooklyn – Canopy triangle ...... 14 Contribution to standards ...... 16 Potential adoption by IBM ...... 16 Contribution to Cloud Foundry...... 17 UMA´s spinoff creation ...... 17 Other potential collaborations ...... 18 SeaClouds as a whole ...... 18 4. SeaClouds Alliance ...... 18 4.1 Joining an existing Alliance ...... 19 4.2 Creating the SeaClouds Alliance ...... 20 4.2.1 Objectives ...... 20 4.2.2 Structure ...... 21 4.2.3 Activities and roles ...... 21 4.2.4 Memorandum of Understanding ...... 22 5. Sustainability update ...... 22 6. Individual Exploitation Plans ...... 24 6.1. ATOS ...... 24 6.2. Universidad de Málaga ...... 27 6.3. Universitá di Pisa ...... 30 6.4. Politecnico di Milano ...... 32 6.5. Nurogames ...... 34 6.6. Cloudsoft ...... 37 7. Conclusions ...... 38 Annex A ...... 40 References ...... 45 D7.4 Final Exploitation Plan 4
List of figures
Figure 1: IaaS and PaaS providers ...... 7 Figure 2: RightScale State of the Cloud Report ...... 9 Figure 3: Gartner´s forecast about hybrid cloud ...... 9 Figure 4: SeaClouds - Canopy meeting ...... 15 Figure 5: SeaClouds demo for IBM ...... 16 Figure 6: MultiClouds DevOps Alliance ...... 19
List of acronyms
Acronym Meaning AAM Abstract Application Model ADP Abstract Deployment Plan DAM Deployment Application Model R&D Research and Development SWOT Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities and Threats CAMP Cloud Application Management for Platforms TOSCA Topology Orchestration Specification for Cloud Applications TC Technical Committee ESOCC European Conference on Service Oriented and Cloud Computing WP7 Work Package 7 SLA Service Level Agreement MoU Memorandum of Understanding D7.4 Deliverable 7.4 AKA Also known as DTT Design Time Toolkit RTE Runtime Engine CTO Chief Technology Officer ARI Atos Research and Innovation QoS Quality of Service QoB Quality of Business IaaS Infrastructure as a Service PaaS Platform as a Service SoTA State of The Art OSS Open Source Software ICT Information and Communication Technologies CF Cloud Foundry D7.4 Final Exploitation Plan 5
Executive Summary
This document provides the final version of the exploitation plans for the SeaClouds project. We have tried to reflect the impact generated at both internal and external level in such different fields like the scientific and research community and the cloud industry.
In the case of the internal impact, this will be described by each partner through the updated version of their individual exploitation plans, which will have an important relevance on the overall exploitation strategy of SeaClouds. On the other hand, the external impact will be demonstrated by showing the wide list of actions carried out, like the contributions to standardization bodies or the improvements provided for related tools like Apache Brooklyn.
One of the important topics of this new delivery is related to the need, realized by the consortium, of extending the project beyond the funding period. The great exploitation potential of a solution like SeaClouds together with the room for improvement that it still has, have led the consortium to consider different alternatives which, from the joint perspective, basically consist on creating an alliance to extend the life of the project for at least an additional year or to join an existing alliance, like the one created by a related project like MODAClouds, called Multi-Cloud DevOps Alliance1 and which counts with the involvement of two SeaClouds partners, namely POLIMI and Atos. Although all the partners of the consortium have stated their intention to sign the required documents (Exploitation agreement or MoU) that provides official validity to these possible Alliances, the internal procedures of some of the legal departments involved have delayed it. However, for the date of the review meeting we expect this document to be finished and signed by all the involved parties.
1 http://multiclouddevops.com/ D7.4 Final Exploitation Plan 6
1. Introduction
This is the last deliverable of the exploitation series, included in WP7 under task 7.3. Herein are collected the multiple efforts carried out by the different partners to generate impact, both internally and externally to the consortium. This is done following two different approaches. On one hand, at individual level, through the individual exploitation plans provided by each partner, and on the other hand, at joint level, with the Alliance (whether this means a creating a new one from scratch or joining the MultiClouds DevOps Alliance), which will support the development of the project beyond the funding period.
This document summarizes the work done along the project lifecycle and which have been embodied on the previous deliverables D7.1, D7.2 and D7.3. This extensive work, crucial for the future of SeaClouds, have included the elucidation of the SeaClouds´ value proposition and value chain, a market and feasibility analysis, the stakeholders identification, a comparative analysis with potential competitors the identification of the exploitable assets and its promotion in relevant forums, etc. As it was logical, the exploitation WP has work hand-on-hand with the technical packages, especially the SeaClouds Architecture, the requirements definition, and the SeaClouds integrated Platform. Another important partnership established during these months has been between exploitation and dissemination, which have aligned their efforts to maximize the impact of SeaClouds. Indeed, some of the exploitation opportunities aroused have been direct consequences from the workshops organized by the project.
The structure of this document is the following. Section 2 provides a quick recap of what SeaClouds is, i.e., the features it provides and the current status of development. Section 3 of this document is devoted to explain the approach followed by SeaClouds to generate impact. This approach has two different targets (the scientific community versus the market) and two dissimilar scopes (internal and external adoption). On this section some important exploitation milestones are also summarized. Section 4 introduces the different alternatives identified for the SeaClouds Alliance, whether this means joining the existing MultiClouds Alliance or creating a totally new one with the corresponding structure to support the endurance of the SeaClouds project beyond the funding period. Section 5 is devoted to the sustainability plan designed for SeaClouds, while section 6 introduces the individual exploitation plans of the different partners. Finally, Section 7 provides the conclusions and lessons learned during the project development, as well as the plans for the Alliance on the coming months.
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2. SeaClouds: an update
As the project has continued evolving since the last exploitation deliverable, we have considered appropriate to provide an update of what SeaClouds is, what it offers and what its current status is. As we have previously defined in other deliverables, SeaClouds is an open source platform that provides seamless adaptive management of complex applications over multiple and heterogeneous clouds. This standards-based framework allows developers to design, develop, plan and manage complex applications in an easier and more efficient way, independently of the underlying provider. Thus, the innovative capabilities offered by SeaClouds, among which we can highlight application portability and cloud interoperability, will turn into improved QoS and QoB.
As described on deliverable D2.4 SeaClouds Final Architecture, delivered on M16, SeaClouds comprises two main pieces or environments (the Design Time Toolkit or DTT and the Runtime Engine RTE), which in turn, include several individual components. The DTT is used to define the desired application topology that will be later deployed on the cloud, while the RTE focuses on ensuring that the performance of the different application modules meets the quality requirements previously defined by the user on the SLAs. Thus, once the topology is defined, the Planner (part of the DTT) generates the DAM (a TOSCA- compliant file) which is used by the RTT (by means of the Deployer, based on Apache Brooklyn [18]) for the deployment. This deployment can involve either IaaS and/or PaaS layers. At IaaS level, most of the market providers are accepted (as can be seen in the next figure) thanks to the use of jClouds [19]. At PaaS level, OpenShift [21] and all Cloud Foundry based platforms (Cloud Foundry [22], Pivotal [23], Canopy [24], IBM BlueMix [25] and HP PaaS [26]) are already supported. We are now working on adding Heroku [27] to this list, but there is still some way to go.
Figure 1: IaaS and PaaS providers
The second version of the SeaClouds integrated platform has been already produced and as happened with the previous one, will be available on the SeaClouds repository on GitHub D7.4 Final Exploitation Plan 8
(https://github.com/SeaCloudsEU/seaclouds-distribution) [10]. This repository provides not only the integrated prototype but also the instructions for downloading and installing it. Additionally, in case of needing only some components of the overall solution, all the binaries produced by each software components of SeaClouds can be downloaded by accessing https://oss.sonatype.org/content/groups/public/eu/seaclouds-project/.
The release of this new version of the SeaClouds Platform has been a very important achievement for the exploitation of the project, not only for the bugs and errors correction from the previous release, but also for the added value functionalities (a fully integrated platform, a better and more friendly user interface with an end-to-end wizard, a TOSCA compliant deployment, the SLA automation, etc.) and the extended number of supported PaaS platforms. All these quantitative and qualitative improvements have been a decisive factor for the emergence of new exploitation opportunities and therefore for its success.
3. Exploitation methodology and approach
As described on the previous deliverables (D7.1, D7.2 and D7.3), the exploitation approach followed by SeaClouds focused on the generation of impact at different levels (internally and externally), targeting both the research community and the industry world. In order to maximize this impact and therefore the success of the project, it’s necessary to keep an eye on the market, analysing the current needs, future trends, etc., keeping thus the alignment of SeaClouds with the real business needs of our potential stakeholders. The following paragraphs delve a bit deeper into these two important concepts.
A continuous market watch, required to know the current SoTA and to keep the project aligned with the ongoing market trends and needs. This iterative process included a throughout market analysis where both competitors and stakeholders were identified; and where the features provided and demanded by each one were analysed and compared with the ones provided by SeaClouds. This continuous market watch together with some advanced analysis tools used along the way have provided some interesting conclusions which have been extremely useful to reinforce the alignment of the project with the current market needs. Example of this is the trend towards multicloud deployments stated by RightScale on its “2016 State of the Cloud Report” [28], where the percentage of enterprises that have a strategy to use multiple clouds held steady at 82% (see Figure 2), with 55% planning on hybrid. D7.4 Final Exploitation Plan 9
h y b r i d
c l o u d s
s Figure 2: RightScale State of the Cloud Report t
This statement goes in line with the forecast provided by Gartner (see Figure 3) which estimates that 50% of large enterprises will have hybrid cloud deployments in 2017 [29]. Another interesting fact on this regard is the growth experienced last year by the cloud computing market, which according to Synergy Research Group [30] grew 28% to reach $110 billion in revenues. Within this growth, we mainly focus on the PaaS market (an important target for SeaClouds), which according to IDC [31] is growing rapidly (30% annually) and will reach $14 billion by 2017. These important figures, which confirm the alignment of the project with the market needs and trends, together with the goals and objectives described by the partners on their individual exploitation plans have generated great expectations regarding the exploitation potential of the SeaClouds Figure 3: Gartner´s forecast about hybrid cloud solution.
Emphasis on impact generation. The main focus of the exploitation team during the entire project lifecycle has been the generation of impact through different channels. The term impact involves a wide range of meanings and scopes. When we talk about impact we mean both impacts on the scientific community but also the business world, whether this is internal to the consortium or external. A very important topic related to this impact is the technology transfer that SeaClouds project is already generating, as evidenced through the case of CloudSoft (and its Apache Brooklyn), Atos (through Canopy) and UMA (with the decision of creating the spinoff). This technology transfer also entails the contributions provided by SeaClouds to Cloud Foundry or to the different standardization bodies related to the project, which provide our two cents to broaden the acceptance of the standard. D7.4 Final Exploitation Plan 10
The sum of all these different impacts and the consequences/opportunities generated from them (with special emphasis on the individual exploitation plans of each partner), are what shape the SeaClouds exploitation.
3.1 Impact creation SeaClouds potential is such that the alternatives for impact generation are multiple. Therefore, the real exploitation potential of SeaClouds can be defined as the sum of all its individual impacts. One of the core elements for the impact generation, at least from the internal point of view, is the individual exploitation plan of each partner of the consortium. As the primary interested players, the consortium partners are the most interested on generating the technology transfer, whether this means transfer to their software portfolio (in the case of the industrial partners) or to the scientific and research community (in the case of the academic ones). At this point of the project, some real examples of achieved technology transfer are already available (like Apache Brooklyn in the case CloudSoft, Canopy in the case of Atos, or with Cloud Foundry and Oasis Tosca from a scientific point of view) as will be described later on this document. In order to maximize this impact it is important to target the right audiences with the appropriate message. Therefore, the following section will try to summarize the different paths towards impact creation, depending on the target audience and the scope thereof.
3.1.1 Impact on Research & Scientific community
Although for SeaClouds would be ideal to generate impact in the cloud market, impacting the research and scientific community is also very important, especially if we want to transfer the obtained knowledge and to advance the current State of The Art. In order to maximize this impact, as stated on deliverable D1.5.3 Dissemination report, the consortium has increased its dissemination and communication efforts in the last months, not only by publishing a wide number of papers and scientific articles (8 publications in international journals, 28 publications in international conferences and 5 publications in national conferences), but also attending a multiple conferences (15 venues at both academic and industrial level where the SeaClouds outcomes where showcased) and fostering collaboration with other related projects (by organizing 4 workshops).
Additionally to the wide range of publications and events attended, the non-industrial efforts during these 30 months included: Unified PaaS Library: An important asset for the impact of the project on the research community is the Unified PaaS Library being developed by SeaClouds. This support library is an open source library that could help organizations to get started on the cloud by providing the freedom of using portable abstractions or cloud- specific features regardless the underlying PaaS provider. Our goal for this library is to become a reference at PaaS level, emulating the success of Apache jClouds2, its counterpart at IaaS level, which consist of an open source multi-cloud toolkit which allows developers to implement and run their applications across multiple clouds without any code changes. The use of jClouds is so widespread that is considered an unofficial standard on the IaaS layer. This is so that most important cloud providers
2 https://jclouds.apache.org/ D7.4 Final Exploitation Plan 11
and cloud software stacks of the market are already offering support for it, including OpenStack, Amazon, Azure, GoGrid, Google or RackSpace. Important achievements of jClouds thanks to its relevance are being accepted by the Apache Foundation or endorsed by OpenStack as the “official” Java binding for interacting with OpenStack clouds at IaaS level. Reaching this relevance level would be an important achievement for SeaClouds, as it would enable alternative exploitation paths and would ensure the project sustainability. Although the Unified PaaS Library is still under development, the latest release of the SeaClouds integrated platform has provided some interesting updates on this library. It already supports a wide range of providers (Cloud Foundry, IBM BlueMix, OpenShift, Pivotal, Canopy, HP PaaS and soon Heroku) and the potential benefits for cloud providers and consumers are multiple, as previously explained on D7.3. SeaClouds has added its two cents to the development of the SoTA by creating this library and making it available to the community. To facilitate the use of this library, SeaClouds has created a step-by-step guide (available at https://github.com/rsucasas/unified-paas) which explains how to download and compile the PaaS Support Library.
Contribution to Standardization bodies: Advantages provided by the use of cloud standards goes far beyond the purely technical issues described on D7.3. The interoperability and portability features offered by the use of OASIS Standards are a key factor for the SeaClouds exploitation as they help to reduce the vendor lock-in and provide access to a wide range of providers at both IaaS and PaaS level. Besides the technical benefits, the use of standards is also important for raising awareness about the project and fostering its adoption. Among those standardization bodies, OASIS standards are especially relevant as they involve more than 5.000 participants representing over 600 organizations and individual members from more than 65 countries. The two main standards with which SeaClouds has greater interaction are CAMP and TOSCA. OASIS CAMP (Cloud Application Management for Platforms) is a specification for managing applications in the context of PaaS while OASIS TOSCA (Topology and Orchestration Specification for Cloud Applications) describes how an application should be deployed. The participation of Cloudsoft on the OASIS CAMP TC3 is especially important for SeaClouds as a direct channel for the interaction with this body, whether this means attending to the face-to-face meetings or showcasing SeaClouds to the meeting audience. On the other hand, CAMP also benefits from SeaClouds CAMP compliance as it acts as a reference implementation of the standard. As regards to TOSCA, SeaClouds is using and hence validating, the suitability of TOSCA YAML to represent different models (AAM, ADP and DAM) used along the framework and which allow us to select, deploy and adapt a multi-cloud application through heterogeneous clouds. Conversely, SeaClouds is also contributing to the standardization of TOSCA, both as an active member of its Technical Committee and by performing research activity directly on TOSCA, as already described on the previous exploitation deliverable D7.3.
3 https://www.oasis-open.org/committees/tc_home.php?wg_abbrev=camp D7.4 Final Exploitation Plan 12
Interactions with these two standards have been an important vehicle to drive adoption of SeaClouds so the efforts made so far will continue and even intensify with the development of the Alliance.
Joining the Cluster on Software Engineering for Cloud Services and Applications [12]. In 2015, SeaClouds decided to join the Cluster on Software Engineering for Cloud Services and applications. The objective of this cluster is to provide a discussion portal where different European projects could identify potential synergies as well as possibilities for collaboration/results adoption between projects. Joining this cluster allowed SeaClouds to have a direct communication channel with almost 20 European projects which could become valuable allies for the dissemination of the project and therefore its adoption. One example of the benefits provided by this alliance was the celebration of the Second SeaClouds Industrial Workshop on the Cloud Expo Europe, held in Frankfurt last November 2015 and where the last version of the SeaClouds integrated platform was presented. Another important event held under the framework of this cluster was the participation on the ICT 2015, where we had a special session on software engineering and technologies for services and applications, as well as a panel with very lively discussions about the challenges faced by the cluster.
Collaboration with other European projects. Due to the importance of the collaboration with other projects, SeaClouds have been quite active on this field, as described on the deliverable D1.5.3. To the organization of the two industrial workshops which will be later described on this document, we have to add the organization of two scientific workshops and a webinar. The scientific workshops took place at two consecutive editions of the European Conference on Service Oriented and Cloud Computing (ESOCC) [1][2]. Participation figures (20 European projects involved, 8 research papers presented, different invited talks on relevant topics like OASIS CAMP and TOSCA initiatives or self-aware adaptive clouds, the organization of a round table about multi-cloud interoperability, etc.) give us an idea of the success achieved by these workshops. As regards to the SeaClouds webinar organized on June 2015, it was presented by Javier Cubo (UMA) and Andrea Turli (Cloudsoft) and counted with 21 registrants from both academia and industry. Additionally, as an attempt to interchange results and analyze possible collaborations with the French project Aeolus, a bi-lateral meeting4 was organized between the two projects on December 2014. Other important collaborations (like MODAClouds [20] or Alien4Clouds [6]) have been developed along the project lifecycle and are widely described on deliverable D7.5.3 Collaborative activities report. Additionally to this, and as an action plan to be developed in the following months under the framework of the SeaClouds Alliance, all the available assets developed within the project will be published on the AppHub5 marketplace.
All these activities and channels have been used with the only purpose of maximizing the SeaClouds impact and to ease its adoption by our potential stakeholders. Although the focus of the above mentioned ones have revolved around the scientific community, other multiple initiatives have targeted industry, as described on the following section.
4 https://drive.google.com/drive/u/0/folders/0BwaMwPGc7NZvc1R5aEJoLTFiZzg 5 https://www.apphub.eu.com/ D7.4 Final Exploitation Plan 13
3.1.2 Market oriented impact
In order to maximize the market impact, SeaClouds has worked on multiple lines of work but which could be grouped in two: fostering internal and external adoption of SeaClouds outcomes. The efforts towards internal adoption have targeted the consortium partners, who are the first interested group on adopting the technologies developed within SeaClouds. In order to do so, we have tasked ourselves with the improvement of the individual exploitation plans to be more concise, realistic and focused on the use of specific SeaClouds outcomes. Among these plans we can distinguish two different levels:
Non-commercial exploitation, mostly carried by academic partners like UPI, Polimi and UMA). This exploitation doesn’t focus (at least not directly) on the commercial exploitation of a given asset. Instead it focuses on creating impact through different research activities, the discovery of innovative algorithms and techniques, the attendance to events or the publications of scientific articles in reputed magazines. These achievements provide a prestige for the involved organizations, which can be later exploited for accessing to new research grants or obtaining new R&D contracts with external organizations. This prestige can be also exploited by attracting new applicants to the new courses and programs generated with the knowledge obtained along the project development, which comprises the main revenue source for this type or institutions.
Commercial exploitation is mostly carried by the industrial partners in the consortium (Atos, Cloudsoft and Nuro) that aim at transferring the project outcomes into new (or existing) products and services which will allow them to generate new revenue streams. A clear example of this is Cloudsoft, who thanks to its involvement on SeaClouds has improved Apache Brooklyn (its reference tool) with extra functionalities, or Atos, who will improve the Canopy portfolio with some of the specific assets developed during the project.
Both types of exploitation (commercial and non-commercial) are covered by the organizations involved in the consortium. However, it is important to highlight that thanks to the great potential foreseen for SeaClouds, some of these organizations have express the will of crossing the bridge towards commercial exploitation by creating a spinoff company that will exploit the outcomes provided by SeaClouds. All the information related to these plans will be later explained on the corresponding section of this document.
As regards to the external adoption, the consortium has heavily relied on the dissemination and communication strategy defined for SeaClouds. Thus, as described on deliverable D1.5.3 Dissemination report, SeaClouds was presented in 15 events and conferences, published scientific articles in 33 conferences and 8 journals, organized 4 workshops (both scientific and industrials), etc. These impressive figures simply reflect the importance that a good dissemination/advertising/marketing campaign may have for the exploitation of a project like SeaClouds. As a result of this intense dissemination and communication campaign, different exploitation opportunities have aroused in the last months. These opportunities, some of which are highlighted on section 3.2, have confirmed our beliefs about the great exploitation potential foreseen for SeaClouds. D7.4 Final Exploitation Plan 14
In order to take full advantage of this potential and to ensure the sustainability of the project beyond the funding period, the idea of the SeaClouds Alliance has aroused. The objective of this Alliance is to maximize SeaClouds impact by continue supporting the development of the SeaClouds technologies as well as by promoting the project outcomes among the appropriated audiences. Thus, thanks to this Alliance, some of the exploitation opportunities aroused during the project lifecycle and which are currently idle could be resumed. More information about this Alliance will be provided in section 4. 3.2 Exploitation milestones
This section highlights some of the main exploitation achievements during the project lifecycle. Since some of them are already included on the individual exploitation plans provided by the different partners, the objective of this section is just to summarize them, highlighting the work done during this period.
The SeaClouds - Apache Brooklyn – Canopy triangle Apache Brooklyn is a software platform that allows the deployment of applications in the cloud through the use of blueprints (design patterns for describing a set of inter-related cloud resources)
Before SeaClouds, Apache Brooklyn was not able to understand blueprints written under the TOSCA specification, which limited the exploitation opportunities for Brooklyn. TOSCA (Topology and Orchestration Specification for Cloud Applications) is an OASIS standard used to describe topologies of cloud based applications, including their components, relationships and the processes required to manage them.
Therefore, under the umbrella of SeaClouds, Cloudsoft has led together with UMA, the creation of the Brooklyn-TOSCA project [14], which focuses on providing support for Apache Brooklyn to understand OASIS TOSCA plans based on Alien4Cloud. Thus, the Brooklyn-TOSCA project, which is already available on Github (https://github.com/Cloudsoft/brooklyn-tosca), has widely benefited from the active contributions provided by SeaClouds. This TOSCA support improvement is already included in the latest release of Apache Brooklyn (version 0.9.06), made available at the end of April, and which demonstrates the deep SeaClouds involvement on improving Brooklyn (continuing the work done on version 0.8.07, where extra features like the persistence support and the HTTP sensors in YAML where already included) as a core element for its sustainability.
On the other hand, Alien4Cloud, one of the initiatives that were initially interested in the advantages provided by SeaClouds, provides a web UI that allows components to be dragged-and-dropped to produce TOSCA compatible blueprints [13]. These blueprints are then delegated to an orchestrator (like Apache Brooklyn) to deploy to a cloud location. From the technical point of view, Alien4Cloud can be seen as a very light version of SeaClouds as it lacks some of the important functionalities (like monitoring, the SLA management or the performance optimization) offered by our solution. Therefore, one of the potential alternatives for the SeaClouds exploitation would be to substitute (or enhance)
6 https://brooklyn.apache.org/v/latest/ 7 https://brooklyn.incubator.apache.org/v/latest/misc/download.html D7.4 Final Exploitation Plan 15
Alien4Cloud on this process. This option becomes even more feasible if we take into account the relationship of Canopy, the Atos Cloud, with Apache Brooklyn.
Apache Brooklyn, which recently graduated from the Apache Incubator to become a Top- Level project [15], is foundational to Cloudsoft AMP - an application blueprint and management platform that simplifies the deployment and management of complex applications, in private or public cloud environments, through automation. Canopy, has recognized the value of having an application-centric view of services and has integrated it into Canopy Compose8, its PaaS solution to deploy, control and manage legacy applications in the cloud through automation.
This is just an example of the Canopy interest on continuously improving their existing portfolio, something required if they want to keep the competitiveness of their cloud solutions, especially on fields like the multi-cloud scenarios, the added-value platform or the management of Service Level Agreements (SLAs), which comprise the cornerstone of a project like SeaClouds. Another example of these solutions is Canopy Cloud Fabric9, a managed cloud service powered by Pivotal Cloud Foundry that enables the development, deployment and scaling of cloud native applications.
The need of improving these solutions together with the innovative features provided by SeaClouds have sparked Canopy´s interest on SeaClouds, leading to start a parallel communication thread to elucidate which of the SeaClouds outcomes are candidates for integration on the Canopy portfolio. The main exponent Figure 4: SeaClouds - Canopy meeting of this interest and candidate for integration is the SLA service, which is responsible for generating and storing formal documents describing electronic agreements between customers as well as application and cloud providers, and for which Canopy foresees a great exploitation potential. An example of this applicability would be adding the SeaClouds SLA and matching service into Canopy Compose, allowing it to bring these features to a wide service.
Canopy´s interest became evident for the first time after the celebration of the first industrial workshop organized by SeaClouds at the Cloud World Forum [3], celebrated in June 2015 in London, were a Canopy delegation headed by Chris Byrne (Business Development Director PaaS) visited our stand and requested a demo of the SeaClouds platform. The conversations initiated there led to the celebration, months later, of a bilateral meeting between Atos Research and Innovation (ARI) and Canopy boards. This meeting, which involved Darren Ratcliff (Canopy CTO) and Adam Jackson (Director of the Research, Innovation and Incubation Department at Canopy) as well as Clara Pezuela (Head of the IT Market) and Daniel Field (Head of Sector at ARI), derived in the incorporation of SeaClouds to the Canopy incubation program. Although this milestone is still on a very early stage, we have already started out monthly teleconferences to ensure the proper evolution of the process. Indeed, the first two
8 https://canopy-cloud.com/application-platforms/canopy-compose 9 https://canopy-cloud.com/application-platforms/canopy-cloud-fabric D7.4 Final Exploitation Plan 16
teleconferences have focused on the information gathering about some components of SeaClouds (mainly the planner and the SLA enforcement) which could be interesting for their future integration on Canopy.
Contribution to standards Importance of cloud standards has been already mentioned on the previous section, so we will not delve into much detail. However, since they have played a very important role for SeaClouds at both technical and business level, we have considered important to highlight them on this section too. The relevance of these OASIS standards is such that the project has joined technical groups of both the CAMP (through Cloudsoft membership [16]) and TOSCA (through both Cloudsoft and SeaClouds own membership [17]). From the technical point of view, they are essential for the operation of SeaClouds itself, as they build the bridge between the DTT and the RTE. Additionally; the portability and interoperability obtained by using them allows SeaClouds to have access to a wide range of providers at both IaaS and PaaS level, making it even more attractive for potential stakeholders. This has been also perceived from the business/exploitation standpoint, since many of the potential stakeholders (Alien4Cloud, IBM, UBS AB, Cloudify [5], etc.) that have shown their interest in SeaClouds (whether this means using the solution as a whole or integrating some specific components into their own portfolio) have done it thanks to its CAMP and/or TOSCA compliance. At the same time, the visibility and recognition obtained by being related with these standardization bodies (code contributions, paper publications, attendance to events and conferences, etc.) provide free promotion that contributes to the SeaClouds adoption and therefore to its sustainability, so it can be considered a milestone/success from the exploitation standpoint.
Potential adoption by IBM As a direct consequence of the organization of the Second Industrial Workshop of the SeaClouds project, which took place under the framework of the Cloud Expo Europe [4] held on November 10th and 11th, 2015 in Frankfurt, SeaClouds established an important relationship with IBM. In this meeting, Javier Cubo, from UMA, showcased a demo of the SeaClouds platform to IBM representatives. As a direct consequence of this demo, Manuel Daza the SoftLayer Sales Representative for IBM in Europe contacted us afterwards and we could discuss, in a telco, the possibility of including SeaClouds in the IBM Marketplace when a more stable/final version was available. Basically, what Manuel Daza was explaining us is that Figure 5: SeaClouds demo for IBM sometimes, their customers need other providers different than SoftLayer or Bluemix. Therefore, they were thinking on an open source solution as SeaClouds which maybe could solve this issue, with the possibility to include our SeaClouds platform, specifically the parts related to the multi-deployment on multiple providers. D7.4 Final Exploitation Plan 17
Since the project was not totally finished at that time and some technical issues were still being addressed, Manuel Daza encouraged us to contact him again after a few months, once the project finally ready for their adoption. Therefore, since the consortium plans to continue its activity on the framework of the SeaClouds Alliance for at least one more year, this will be one of the action points of this period.
Contribution to Cloud Foundry SeaClouds has also impacted on a reference platform at PaaS level like Cloud Foundry (CF). Originally created by VMware, Cloud Foundry10 is an open source cloud Platform as a Service where developers can build, deploy, run and scale applications on both public and private cloud models. Licensed under Apache 2.0, Cloud Foundry supports multiple languages and frameworks (Java, Node.js, Go, PHP, Python and Ruby) and offers a high level of customization. This customization level together with its free and open source nature have turn Cloud Foundry into one of the main references at PaaS level. The involvement of some consortium partners (like Atos and CloudSoft) in the Cloud Foundry Foundation, together with its relevance at PaaS level has driven the interest of SeaClouds, which has also impacted on Cloud Foundry by contributing to its development with a technical improvement. Before SeaClouds, Cloud Foundry allowed the users to retrieve only a limited number of environment variables, but thanks to the improvements provided by SeaClouds, it now allows the users to retrieve all the variables. An example that illustrates this is the case of an application deployed on Pivotal (a Cloud Foundry based platform) with ClearDB (the MySql service they offer) database. Before SeaClouds, the database connection string was unreachable, forcing the users to operate manually on the database. Thanks to the improvements provided by SeaClouds, this connection string is now available, and the manual tasks can be automated. This is just a simple example of the impact produced by SeaClouds on Cloud Foundry and its users, which now have a better control and understanding of their application´s performance. This affects indirectly to SeaClouds, who by improving Cloud Foundry is contributing to increase the already large audience of this platform, and therefore increasing the adoption possibilities for SeaClouds. As all the developments provided by SeaClouds, this improvement is published on Github, on the link https://github.com/cloudfoundry/cf-java-client/pull/264.
UMA´s spinoff creation Another important achievement for the exploitation of the SeaClouds project is the decision taken by the University of Malaga (UMA) regarding the creation of a spinoff company that will provide services on top of SeaClouds. The potential demonstrated by the SeaClouds solution together with its open source approach (and the Apache 2.0 license [7]) offers a wide range of business opportunities for an organization with the required expertise. Therefore, UMA, which is already using the know-how acquired in SeaClouds, has decided to apply to the spin-off program of this University. Although the success of this application is not yet guaranteed since it requires the final approval of a dedicated department at UMA, there are high expectations that after this slow and cumbersome process, the spinoff company will be finally created.
10 https://www.cloudfoundry.org/ D7.4 Final Exploitation Plan 18
Other potential collaborations The two industrial workshops organized by the project (at Cloud World Forum and at Cloud Expo Europe) were a good opportunity for testing SeaClouds in front of a specialized audience, which could evaluate the usefulness of our solution. If the first workshop was useful to get initial feedback of what market players could think of SeaClouds and to establish first connections with companies like Ormuco11, OrionVM12 and Canopy13, the second workshop was not less important, allowing us to reach companies like Iskratel14, Liquid Sequence15 and IBM16. Although the potential collaborations with most of these projects are currently on standby (either because of SeaClouds was not fully mature at that point or because the involved companies required time consuming procedures which have delayed the process), none of them have been definitely ruled out and we plan to resume the activity in the near future under the framework of the SeaClouds Alliance. The same applies for other opportunities mentioned in previous deliverables, like Cloudyn [8], a cloud monitoring system and monitoring platform that optimizes cloud management across public, private and hybrid clouds and UBS AB [9], a Swiss global financial services companies that has shown interest on SeaClouds thanks to its relationship with TOSCA.
SeaClouds as a whole The great modularity of SeaClouds offers a large number of exploitation alternatives through the individual components (or combinations of them) developed within the project, whether this is by the consortium partners or by an external entity. However, the full potential of the project relies on the exploitation of SeaClouds as a whole. The objective of this modularity was two-fold: on one hand to ease the adoption of SeaClouds (through the solution as a whole or its individual components) and on the other hand, to enable multiple and complementary channels to ensure the project´s sustainability.
The open source approach followed by SeaClouds from the very beginning and the choice of a non-restrictive license like Apache 2.0 reinforces the potential of this option. Thus, any consortium member (for instance the UMA spinoff) or external entity willing to exploit the SeaClouds platform by providing services on top of it (consultancy, training, customization, etc.) could freely do it.
In order to support this and other exploitation alternatives, the idea of the SeaClouds Alliance has aroused, which is explained on the following section.
4. SeaClouds Alliance
In order to take advantage of the great exploitation potential of the SeaClouds solution, the consortium has decided to extend the life of the project beyond the funding period. The goal of this extension is a two-fold: first continuing evolving the SeaClouds platform and its individual assets, which have demonstrated great exploitation potential for both the partners of the consortium and some external organizations; and second, to promote the
11 http://www.ormuco.com/ 12 http://www.orionvm.com/ 13 https://canopy-cloud.com/ 14 http://iskratel.com/ 15 http://www.liquidsequence.com/ 16 http://www.ibm.com/ D7.4 Final Exploitation Plan 19
current and future achievements among the potential stakeholders who could adopt the SeaClouds technologies. Two different approaches have been considered for the SeaClouds Alliance. The first one consists of joining an existing Alliance while the second one consists on creating our own from scratch. These two alternatives are explained on the following lines.
4.1 Joining an existing Alliance One of the most interesting alternatives that have been considered for the SeaClouds Alliance is joining one of the existing alliances related to this kind of projects. The rationale behind joining an existing Alliance instead of creating one from scratch is the same behind the decision of joining an existing open source community (like the Apache Brooklyn or the OASIS TOSCA) and not creating one from scratch: maximizing efficiency and impact while minimizing efforts. Joining an existing Alliance would simplify the work to be done, since the structure and the previous work required is already done, while would contribute to maximize its impact, as it already involves external parties that could adopt SeaClouds outcomes or contribute to their development and promotion.
Since two of the SeaClouds partners (POLIMI and Atos) are already involved in other projects that have created alliances like this, we will use them to leverage this alternative. The main option identified for this is the MultiClouds DevOps Alliance [32], formed by a group of ten different partners (Atos, Sintef, Polimi, Imperial College, IeAT, SoftTeam, Siemens, BOC and CA Technologies) from seven different countries which, alike SeaClouds, aims at promoting and fostering the adoption and evolution of the technologies and concepts developed along the project.
Several factors have been considered for choosing the MultiClouds Devops Alliance as the ideal candidate: the involvement of two partners of the consortium on this Alliance, the common ground of the two project regarding current market trends, the direct and instant access to broad base of users that we could exploit, the greater dissemination power provided by a bigger Consortium/Alliance, the larger number of internal collaboration Figure 6: MultiClouds DevOps Alliance alternatives that could derive from this alliance, etc.
Taking a further look beyond the multiple similarities in terms of technologies and scopes, another interesting factor is the direct access to the DevOps community that this Alliance would provide, combining efforts to reach the open source community (Devs) provided by Modelio [33] (a modelling environment that supports natively UML and BPMN) and used by the MultiClouds Alliance, together with our efforts to reach the Apache Brooklyn Community (Ops).
D7.4 Final Exploitation Plan 20
The benefits of joining an already existing initiative (lower organization efforts, using the existing structure and paperwork, etc.) together with the greater exploitation and marketing potential above described, have led the SeaClouds Consortium to perform the initial steps on this regard. The evolution of these steps and its final status of this will be presented during the review meeting to be held in Brussels next May.
4.2 Creating the SeaClouds Alliance The second alternative for the SeaClouds Alliance is to create our own one from scratch, involving only the partners of the consortium. This section describes the objectives, structure, activities and roles of this option, together with the MoU that would be signed by all the partners to shown their commitment with the Alliance.
4.2.1 Objectives The objective of the SeaClouds Alliance is to maximize the SeaClouds impact by continuing to support the development of the SeaClouds technologies as well as to promote the project among the appropriated audiences.
Examples of this development are the improvement of the Unified PaaS Library, the continuous contributions to the evolution of the cloud standards (TOSCA) or Cloud Foundry, the technical enhancement of specific components of the architecture, etc. As important of the technical development is the promotion of the project results. This extended period will be useful to continue making noise about SeaClouds through the all the available channels (website, social media, publications, attendance to conferences, workshops and industrial events, etc.).
In order to achieve the above mentioned objective, the consortium will focus for at least, an additional year on: Developing a marketing campaign that will pursue the adoption of SeaClouds by: o Fostering SeaClouds awareness . By intensifying the dissemination and communication activities towards the appropriated audiences. . By actively participating on the Cluster on Software Engineering for Cloud Applications and Services, seeking for collaboration opportunities that may arise with other R&D projects. . Through the community building, capitalizing existing relationships with concrete communities like Apache Brooklyn, OASIS Standards, etc.
o Promoting stakeholder´s outreach . By Identifying and contacting potential stakeholders on the multiple events organized. . By generating the dissemination material required for the engagement of these stakeholders. This may include promotional and demonstration videos, posters, flyers, webinars, etc.
Evolving SeaClouds technology o By maintaining and evolving the different components and innovations provided by the SeaClouds framework at both individual and overall level o By contributing, when possible, to key related technologies (like cloud standards, Apache Foundation projects, etc.). D7.4 Final Exploitation Plan 21
o By pushing internal adoption by the consortium partners.
4.2.2 Structure After considering several discussions among the consortium partners we have concluded that the SeaClouds Alliance will continue with the same structure that the project adopted during the project lifecycle.
Atos is the project coordinator.
UMA will be the scientific coordinator.
UPI will lead dissemination with the support of Atos on the industrial side.
The involvement of these and the other partners will remain the same as the consortium had during the project development.
4.2.3 Activities and roles
The main activities to be carried out by the SeaClouds Alliance are:
Promotion and Marketing through the dissemination and communication activities defined on the dissemination strategy, and through the contribution to the multiple initiatives (OASIS standards, Apache Brooklyn, etc.) previously identified. The first example in this category will be the presentation of SeaClouds on the NetFutures conference, to be held in March 2016. These activities are important not only for the promotion SeaClouds but also to foster its adoption. Thus, the publication of scientific papers, the attendance to industry-related events and conferences, the use (and generation if necessary) or marketing materials, the attendance to the periodical meetings of the OASIS Standards, or intensifying the presence in social media are some examples of the dissemination and communication strategy to follow during this period.
Technical Development: Supporting, maintaining and evolving the technical assets developed within the project while the SeaClouds Alliance is still in place. Examples of this support are the development and promotion of the new achievements of the PaaS Support Library, as it could become an unofficial standard for PaaS as jClouds is for IaaS. Another example is the continuous improvement of Apache Brooklyn, which is useful not only for the technical improvement of the project, but also from the exploitation standpoint, as it could act as a vehicle to reach the existing developer community Apache Brooklyn, strengthening SeaClouds position and fostering both adoption and impact.
Management: the previously defined structure will be responsible Alliance management, trying to assure as far as possible, the governance of the Alliance and its proper operation.
D7.4 Final Exploitation Plan 22
4.2.4 Memorandum of Understanding A Memorandum of Understanding MoU (a legal document that contains the basic terms and conditions for the operation of this Alliance) has been circulated among the consortium members. Although all of them have confirmed their intentions to sign the document, some of them are still pending on confirmation by their legal departments to revise legal clauses, being expected its signature on the following weeks. The current version of this document, which will be final if no changes are requested by these legal departments in the following weeks, is available on the Annex A. The initial duration of this Alliance is currently set to at least, a year after the project completion, but this could be revised and extended if all the partners agree.
5. Sustainability update
As we already mentioned, sustainability is a very important topic for SeaClouds, especially if we want to ensure the project´s endurance beyond the funding period. The consortium is aware of that and therefore, has defined a sustainability plan which has been introduced several times on previous deliverables (D7.2 and D7.3). This strategy is implemented through a branched approach with separated twigs that can be addressed either separately or jointly:
The open source approach. The benefits that open source provide to the project have been clearly stated from the beginning of the project and therefore it’s at the core of the SeaClouds strategy for impact and sustainability. Open source acts as an enabler for both consortium members and external stakeholders to leverage SeaClouds assets, while facilitates the dissemination and adoption of the project outcomes. The choice of a non-restrictive license like Apache 2.0 is not a coincidence, as it enables any consortium partner or external entity to use, modify or improve the SeaClouds outcomes without feat of infringing any IPRs. The goal for this is to ease the adoption of SeaClouds outcomes by third parties, whether this involves its integration with existing products or its use for the development of new ones. Another important reason for this open approach is to ease the interaction with industry-driven standards like OASIS CAMP and TOSCA, something unfeasible with a more restrictive license. The choice of license is also related with the consortium desire of being accepted as incubator of the Apache Foundation, something that would ensure project sustainability itself. This cumbersome process requires several contributions to other projects managed by the Apache Foundation Committee (like Brooklyn) over a long period of time, so the SeaClouds consortium is already working on this actively, being the first contributions already integrated on the last release of Apache Brooklyn. Following this opened approach, and as happened with the first release, the second version of the SeaClouds Integrated Platform and its added functionalities are available on the SeaClouds´ Github repository located at https://github.com/SeaCloudsEU/seaclouds-distribution.
The contribution to industry-driven standards. Contribution to vendor-driven standards like CAMP and TOSCA is crucial not only for the sustainability of the project, but for the operation of SeaClouds itself. For instance, OASIS TOSCA acts on D7.4 Final Exploitation Plan 23
one hand as a vehicle to foster SeaClouds adoption (through the dissemination of the project and the contributions it provides to that standardization body) and on the other hand, for the operation of the SeaClouds solution itself as it acts as a bridge between the Design Time Toolkit and the Runtime Engine. Most CAMP contributions have come from Cloudsoft, one of the industrial partners of the consortium which is an active member of the OASIS CAMP Technical Committee [16]. University of Pisa (UPI) on the contrary, has been actively participating in standardizations activities related to the OASIS TOSCA TC, as described on their individual exploitation plan. SeaClouds itself is also a member of the OASIS TOSCA TC [17], on an attempt to promote the results of the SeaClouds project and therefore, maximize its impact.
The use of well-established and widely accepted tools like Apache Brooklyn. Apache Brooklyn is another key element for the sustainability of the SeaClouds project. The reasons for stating this are multiple: first at technical level, since it’s used as the project´s deployment engine. Second at impact level, since Brooklyn is used as a complementary vehicle to promote project´s adoption (and validation) among the Brooklyn´s user community. Therefore a continuous promotion of the project and the capabilities it offers (like multi-cloud support or the PaaS layer extension) among the community will be enforced, on an attempt to attract the users of this community. And third, as a mean to reach a goal: as a project of the Apache Foundation [11], contributing to the enhancement of Brooklyn can be the gateway for SeaClouds to enter the Apache Incubator program, one of the ideal goals of this strategy. On this regard, the latest release of Apache Brooklyn (version 0.8.017) has already included some important contributions from SeaClouds (like the persistence support and HTTP sensors in YAML). In order to maximize project impact and to support the sustainability strategy, SeaClouds will continue this contribution as long as the SeaClouds Alliance keeps operating.
The individual exploitation intentions of the consortium partners. The primarily interested in developing, maintaining and promoting the project are the partners involved in the SeaClouds consortium. They have been the main promoters and believers of the SeaClouds concept, as they have invested their time, money and resources during almost three years. This interest is not altruistic but pursues an objective, either this involves the development of a software component to be integrated into a commercial offering or the discovery of a new algorithm that will resolve an important scientific paradigm. For that reason, the consortium partners have been improving and evolving their individual exploitation plans, adapting them to the new opportunities aroused in the last months and aiming at continue supporting the development of SeaClouds.
The different efforts made by the partners on each of these branches are extremely important for the impact generation and for the adoption of the project outcomes. Therefore, in the following months, the SeaClouds Alliance will redouble efforts around this strategy and will increase their dissemination and communication activities (publishing peer reviewed papers and articles in scientific journals, attending to different events and conferences, or performing SeaClouds demonstrations now that the final release of the SeaClouds Integrated Platform is now available).
17 https://brooklyn.incubator.apache.org/v/latest/misc/download.html D7.4 Final Exploitation Plan 24
6. Individual Exploitation Plans
The relevance of the individual exploitation plans of the different partners is highlighted due to the consortium unwillingness to perform a joint exploitation. Therefore, although the final version of the individual plans will be presented on deliverable D7.4 scheduled for M30, this document present an update from the version presented on D7.2.
Although in some cases there have been no substantial changes, in some others there have been some interesting updates, which are detailed in the following sections. 6.1. ATOS
Partner profile Atos is a leader in digital services with 2014 pro forma annual revenue of circa €11 billion and 93.000 employees in 72 countries. These figures are due to the recent acquisition of diverse companies like Bull, a French IT leading company that has turned Atos into a top Europe-based cloud computing company and a major player in cybersecurity. The two companies combined, currently numbers 5 and 10 respectively in cloud computing in Western Europe, would leap to the fast-growing industry´s number two spot by revenue behind U.S.-based Amazon and ahead of Microsoft.
Atos serves a global client base by delivering IT services through Consulting & Systems Integration, Cloud Computing solutions, Managed Operations, and transactional services through Worldline, the European leader and a global player in the payments services industry. It is the Worldwide Information Technology Partner for the Olympic & Paralympic Games and is listed on the NYSE Euronext Paris market. Atos operates under the brands Atos, Atos Consulting, Canopy, Worldline and Atos Worldgrid. With its deep technology expertise and industry knowledge, the company has developed a large customer base and has a wide experience across finance market sector, public administration, media & technology, energy & utilities, telecommunications, transport and logistics, health and manufacturing.
Atos has a number of complementary Cloud services and delivery models, to reflect the variety of business needs and opportunities of our customers. This expanding portfolio is through the “Canopy” brand, originating as a joint venture with VMware and EMC2 in 2012. Since then, Canopy now includes all Atos cloud solutions. Depending on our customers’ cloud breakthrough ambition (degree of customer organizational, cultural and systems compatibility with the cloud model) and Technology environment (degree of heterogeneity of customer IT landscape), Canopy offers different solutions that range from traditional outsourcing and managed services (IaaS), to platforms (PaaS) for development and software solutions (SaaS).
Exploitable results SeaClouds represents a double opportunity for Atos in order to first, improve the quality of the company´s portfolio and second, to be at the forefront of the state of the art (SOTA) in the cloud environment. Thus, exploitable results obtained from SeaClouds also represent a source of knowledge that can be transferred to other internal initiatives or research projects that could nourish the company in the near future. There are multiple exploitable assets which can be interesting for Atos, some of them with a maturation level enough to be already exploited and some others which could be further D7.4 Final Exploitation Plan 25
developed (through the Alliance, through their involvement on other research projects, etc.) for future integration.
More concretely, SeaClouds represents three different areas in cloud computing that Atos recognizes as priorities for the industry:
1. Multi-cloud scenarios, starting with hybrid (public/private) clouds that are already a customer demand.
2. Management of Service Level Agreements, which will allow improving the QoS we offer to our customers.
3. Added-value platforms, tools and services to facilitate application deployment and management on the PaaS and layer.
The foreseen SeaClouds results include the integrated platform for facilitated discovery, monitoring and management. Much like the over exploitation research of the project, Atos’ exploitation interest is looking at the value of the four primary components of the platform: SeaClouds’ Discoverer, SLA Service, Planner, Deployer and Monitor modules, covering the full application lifecycle governance.
SeaClouds SLA Service: The SLA service focuses on the relationship between the application provider and the final user. The SLA service is combined with an independent cloud monitoring functionality based on unified “cloud offering” independent metrics such as latency and response time of cloud applications, becoming a powerful tool for the customers to measure the QoS provided by the application provider and reversely, a way for the application provider to monitor performance and to improve customer satisfaction. Therefore, since Atos is an application provider (among other roles), the SLA component arouses great interest, especially for its application on Canopy. Two clear candidates to integrate this functionality are Compose (which accelerates the development and deployment of a wide variety of applications enabling organizations to significantly improve OPEX and quicker time-to-market) and Cloud Fabric (a managed cloud service based on Pivotal Cloud Foundry that accelerates the time-to-market for the next generation of digital applications. Adding the SLA to these two projects would improve the QoS offered to Canopy´s customers, who would have a better control and understanding of the services provided. At the same time, it could enable new revenue sources based on concrete parameters specified SLAs while preventing from penalties caused by the breach of the agreements. On the other hand, customer feedback about this SLA could become powerful tool to evaluate Canopy´s products, enabling an innovation channel to improve the tools and adapt to the ongoing needs of the customers. SeaClouds Discoverer: The “matchmaking” quality of an application’s requirements to an ideal platform or infrastructure. As a cloud provider, Atos sees the value of the SeaClouds Discoverer in the reverse: how to proportion our PaaS and IaaS to best fit our target customers. Adding this functionality to the portfolio of Canopy or yourCIM would be a powerful tool to increase our customers´ satisfaction.
D7.4 Final Exploitation Plan 26
SeaClouds Planner and Deployer: Hybrid cloud solutions are already a part of Atos’ portfolio, and the arrival of additional multi-cloud scenarios is seen as a likely rising trend. Tools such as the SeaClouds Planner and Deployer can help prepare such deployments amongst Atos own data centres and those of the customers’, in build- to-order service packages. Thus, this combination can be very useful for the hybrid and multi-cloud approaches followed by Canopy and yourCIM.
SeaClouds Monitor: As an IaaS and PaaS provider, Atos looks to offer added-value tools integrated in its managed infrastructure and platform offerings. The innovative application-focused monitoring (including metrics, SLA-based policies, etc.) that SeaClouds is developing for distributed applications across multiple clouds could provide improved QoS for customers.
Vendor-independent API: Multi-sourcing is coming to cloud computing, increasing the need for interoperability for multiple clouds. SeaClouds’ independent API can facilitate complex scenarios such as hybrid, bursting, etc. among the cloud deployments at Atos and its customers.
This initial analysis of exploitable assets provides input to a larger Atos exploitation development roadmap for SeaClouds assets.
Target audience The main target audiences for Atos exploitation of SeaClouds are the internal departments and associated companies that could adopt the technologies developed in the project. Two clear examples are Canopy (the Atos cloud), YourCIM and ARI (Atos Research and Innovation) Department. Canopy is the Atos cloud brand that drives business transformation through open, orchestrated cloud services. Canopy could be impacted by SeaClouds through improved products and services derived from the integration on their portfolio of the SeaClouds outcomes. Canopy´s customers are often large, blue-chip companies, looking not just for one product, but a wider range of services from an IT provider. For example, an IaaS solution could be accompanied by SaaS products and managed services to run them. The extent and deployment of such cloud services are different from customer to customer, whereas one might be more suited for an outsourced IaaS from Atos data centres, while another requires a local implementation of a private cloud in their own facilities. This flexibility allows Atos to reach various sectors and company profiles, from Finance, Healthcare, Energy, Manufacturing, Telecom, etc. The arrival of more tailor made PaaS offerings expands to further SMEs, as well.
Another important target for the SeaClouds outcomes is yourCIM18, a modular cloud infrastructure manager comprising open source components with standard-based interfaces. This solution, which provides a cost effective alternative to expensive proprietary systems, is also a potential adopter of the SeaClouds outcomes.
Finally, the ARI group itself is also a target audience for the SeaClouds outcomes. Being involved in multiple European projects and cloud initiatives, ARI is already adopting some of the technologies developed on SeaClouds and using them in recently-funded projects like
18 https://atos.net/content/dam/global/documents/we-are/atos-brochure-research-innovation.pdf D7.4 Final Exploitation Plan 27
CloudSocket19, which will extend and improve the technical developments and therefore, demonstrate the SeaClouds impact.
Exploitation strategy The main objective for Atos in SeaClouds is to integrate the knowledge and the assets generated during the project development into its portfolio. In order to achieve this, two main paths have been identified: Through Canopy´s portfolio: An important objective for Atos is to integrate the knowledge and assets generated by SeaClouds into the cycle for innovation adoption, especially in the case of Canopy. In order to achieve this integration, some interviews have been maintained with the Canopy´s managers. The main outcome from these meetings is the inclusion of SeaClouds in the Canopy´s incubation program. Although we are still on a very early stage of this adoption, monthly teleconferences have been already scheduled to ensure the proper evolution of the process. Indeed, the first two teleconferences have already happened, focusing on the information gathering about some components of SeaClouds like the planner and the SLA enforcement.
Through YourCIM program: Atos Research and Innovation (ARI) department has an incubator that includes a collection of developing R&D assets under the Your Cloud Infrastructure Management (also called “yourCIM”) program. The portfolio of this modular cloud infrastructure manager comprises a wide range of open source components with standard-based interfaces on areas like brokerage, SLA negotiation, QoS monitoring, etc. In addition to integration into existing commercial solutions (as mentioned in relation to Canopy’s portfolio), the open source tools developed in SeaClouds can be further extended to integrate with other yourCIM assets.
Additionally to the main paths identified above, a common practice at ARI (Atos Research and Innovation) department is to reuse some of the project outcomes in future projects, which besides involving the adoption of some SeaClouds technologies, entails the development and improvement of these assets. This is the case of some technologies used by SeaClouds, which have been inherited from MODAClouds, a previous FP7 project.
Furthermore, as an active member of the Cluster on Software Engineering for Cloud Services and Applications, Atos will seek for collaboration opportunities within the framework of the cluster. This collaboration may include the reuse of technical components developed by the project or the co-organization of specific events as it happened with the Second Industrial Workshop celebrated during the Cloud Expo Europe in Frankfurt.
6.2. Universidad de Málaga
Partner Profile The University of Malaga (UMA) is a public institution which promotes outstanding research and teaching within the European Higher Education Area. The origins of the University of Málaga date back to the 1960s, with more than 40 years of existence, it has become a significant promoter of culture in the city, whilst providing a considerable basis for
19 https://www.cloudsocket.eu/ D7.4 Final Exploitation Plan 28
technology and research in the future. With a university community of just over 40,000 people, over the last decade, the institution follows an educational model to promote competitive, quality teaching which is employment-oriented and accredited in Europe, and also the internationalisation and mobility of its teachers and students. In this trend, the most outstanding and recent project of the UMA is the International Campus of Excellence Andalucía TECH, which promotes internationalisation and excellence in education, research and knowledge transfer.
The research group involved in SeaClouds, the Service and Component Engineering for Internet Computing (SCENIC) at UMA is a team of GISUM, the Software Engineering Research Group at University of Malaga, which is one of the official Groups of Excellence of the Regional Andalusian Government. SCENIC is formed by faculty staff members, postdocs and PhD students, as well as MSc students enrolled in research projects. The research interests of SCENIC are focused on the Service-Oriented Computing, the Component-Based Software Engineering, the Cloud Computing, and the Internet of Things. The team has developed methodologies applied to the automatic orchestration and composition of services and components, as well as the discovery, the interoperability analysis, and the dynamic adaptation and reconfiguration of services and component, in the scope of diverse research projects such as NESSoS: Network of Excellence on Engineering Secure Future Internet Software Services and Systems (http://www.nessos-project.eu). European Commission, FP7-ICT-2009-256980. In all these issues, the members of the team have provided solutions published and disseminated in prestigious international journals and conferences in the software engineering field
Exploitable Results UMA will exploit the SeaClouds results mainly based on the know-how acquired during the development of SeaClouds, to extend its technology transfer offer as follows:
UMA develops active collaborations with some software and IT companies, through the SCENIC group, mainly located in the “Parque Tecnologico de Andalucia” (Andalusian Technological Park, http://www.pta.es/). Technology transfer collaboration was performed by UMA’s group in the scope of applying Cloud Computing for eLearning and Data Mining Technologies. The results achieved in SeaClouds are already giving to UMA the opportunity to offer new solutions to distribute the different modules, usually composing an eLearning platform and monitor and optimize its execution over different and heterogeneous clouds. The direct promotion and collaboration with the major standards for cloud interoperability. UMA is already promoting both TOSCA and CAMP, and also contributing to them (proposing some extensions related to the multi-deployment of cloud applications in heterogeneous clouds) and to the main implementations of both (Open TOSCA or Brooklyn, respectively). UMA is very interested in the developments on Apache Brooklyn, being the main responsible of the Deployer and the extensions over Brooklyn (mainly PaaS deployment and TOSCA support in Brooklyn).
Additionally, an alternative exploitation path that has aroused thanks to SeaClouds is the creation of a spinoff company, which will allow UMA to exploit the know-how acquired during the project to provide support and consultancy services to some companies. Therefore, although the success of this application is not guaranteed as it depends of another department, we have decided to apply to spin-off program of this University. D7.4 Final Exploitation Plan 29
Target Audience The target audience that UMA will try to reach on this project involves three different groups: First, the scientific community. UMA, in collaboration with SeaClouds partners, which could attract a critical mass of attention from the scientific community interested in the area addressed by the SeaClouds project. Second, the software and IT companies mainly related to services and cloud computing. UMA has already performed collaborations in cloud computing projects applying technology transfer in some companies. Third, the academic and training activities. UMA has already proposed new activities in the academic scope (see KPIs).
Exploitation Strategy In the SeaClouds project, UMA is performing an exploitation strategy keeping in mind to contribute to UMA’s research and technology transfer activities in service oriented and cloud computing. Technology transfer, especially towards SMEs, is one of the missions of UMA.
SeaClouds is being an opportunity for UMA to increase its skill in the software engineering for service and cloud-oriented systems by taking into account the specificities of cloud service platforms. Thus, UMA is already using the know-how acquired in SeaClouds to enrich the curricula and the range of courses offered by UMA to students and organizations (public administration, industry, SME, etc.) using the latest trends on cloud technology.
In addition, UMA is achieving more knowledge to continue working on activities related to the scientific, steering, and standardization committees and groups related to Cloud Computing and Service-Oriented Computing in which UMA is involved, such as: the IFIP “Working Group on Services-oriented Systems” (IFIP WG 2.14/6.12/8.10); INES, the Spanish Platform for Software and Services; ERCIM, European Research Consortium for Informatics and Mathematics; ESOCC, European Conference on Service-Oriented and Cloud Computing; International Subcommittee SC38 “Distributed Application Platforms and Services (DAPS)” (Web services, Service-Oriented Architecture, and Cloud Computing) that belongs to the International Committee ISO/IEC/ JTC1 “Information and Communication Technology”, with ANSI in the activity field: “Standardization for interoperable Distributed Application Platform and services”.
UMA, as a partner of SeaClouds, is involved in the Clusters of European Projects on Cloud Computing.
UMA can anticipate the following KPIs: A Cloud Computing subject proposed in the next course (and followings) for the Master Degree in Computer Science in UMA. It will be offered in the third semester of the master, with 90 ECTS. A Master in Big Data Analytics (http://bigdata.lcc.uma.es), as a program offered by UMA and the SolidQ company considering the last technologies related to Big Data and Cloud Computing. At least four peer-reviewed scientific publications. At least one scientific/industrial dissemination event. At least one PhD thesis on cloud computing. D7.4 Final Exploitation Plan 30
UMA is studying the possibility to create a spin-off taking advantage of the experience the research group is acquiring as regards the Cloud Computing.
6.3. Universitá di Pisa
Partner Profile The University of Pisa (http://www.unipi.it/) was founded in 1343 and it currently counts with around 1,600 permanent faculty members, around 1,500 administrative employees, and currently hosts around 50,000 students. The Department of Computer Science of the University of Pisa (UPI) was the first Department of Computer Science that was established in Italy, and then the first to start a university degree and a Ph.D. school in Computer Science in Italy. Currently the Department counts 65 permanent faculty members (full, associate and assistant professors), around 30 research associates, and 55 Ph.D. students.
The group that participates in SeaClouds project has a strong expertise in the development of rigorous methodologies for the discovery, adaptation, and orchestration of software services for service-based and cloud-based computing.
Exploitable Results UPI intends to exploit the methodologies and innovations resulting from SeaClouds to increase its expertise and activities in the area of cloud computing, in particular on employing TOSCA for representing, deploying and managing complex multi-cloud applications, on discovering capabilities provided by different IaaS and PaaS providers, and on planning the deployment, monitoring and reconfiguration of multi-cloud applications. UPI plans to exploit the project results and experience for research activities, education activities, and technology transfer activities. UPI also intends to exploit the SeaClouds platform, and in particular the “DrACO” discoverer tool, that is currently the only available tool for retrieving a TOSCA representation of available cloud offerings.
Target Audience The target audience that UPI will try to reach involves different groups: Researchers in the area of service-oriented and cloud computing, especially those focusing on cloud interoperability and on multi-cloud orchestration, deployment, and management, Enterprises and application developers interested in the agile management of cloud- based applications, Enterprises and individuals interested in cloud standards and cloud standardization committees, in particular OASIS TOSCA, MS and BS students, and PhD students.
Exploitation Strategy Exploit the knowledge and results from SeaClouds to produce peer-reviewed scientific publications, Participate in the OASIS TOSCA TC, and perform research activities aimed at contributing to the definition and adoption of the TOSCA standard, Exploit the results and methodologies obtained from SeaClouds to promote and establish new research projects and initiatives, D7.4 Final Exploitation Plan 31
Integrate the presentation of some of the results and innovations from SeaClouds in the courses offered to MS and BS students, Exploit the knowledge and experience gained in SeaClouds to offer cloud computing topics for new PhD these, Exploit the IT Centre of UPI (the first Dell competency center for HPC, which carries over experimental applied research activities on cloud-based systems) to transfer SeaClouds technology results to the enterprises collaborating with the Centre.
The KPIs identified by UPI for exploitation in D7.2 were: a) At least four peer-reviewed scientific publications. UPI published more than twelve peer-reviewed papers (four of which published in scientific journals) b) At least one new project proposal on cloud computing. UPI has submitted two European project proposals, and one National project proposal. c) At least one course on cloud computing for the BS Degree or MS Degree in Computer Science offered by UPI. UPI has activated and is currently offering the new course “Cloud and Green Computing: An Introduction” for the BS Degree in Computer Science. d) At least one PhD thesis on cloud computing. One PhD thesis will be defended this year (2016) on the use of TOSCA for designing, analyzing, and reusing cloud-based applications. e) At least one industrial dissemination event. UPI participated in the Cloud World Forum, June 24-25, 2015, London, United Kingdom.
In addition to the above activities: f) Participation to the standardization activities of the OASIS TOSCA TC. UPI is participating in the standardization activities of the OASIS TOSCA TC, and in the “Instance model ad-hoc working group”, that is a sub-committee working on how to model information about running instances of TOSCA applications. The aim of UPI is to continue working in this ad-hoc sub- committee, and to share and promote the results and experience gained with the SeaClouds project. g) Scientific publications on the OASIS TOSCA standard UPI has published various peer-reviewed articles on TOSCA (listed in ”D1.5.3 Dissemination Report”), and has recently submitted an article on the “DrACO” discoverer developed in SeaClouds project, which is currently the only available tool for retrieving a TOSCA representation of available cloud offerings. h) Participation in the “Clusters of European Projects on Cloud Computing” UPI is actively involved in the activities of the clusters (https://eucloudclusters.wordpress.com), in particular UPI is coordinating the reporting on standardization activities of the fours clusters. i) Four MS thesis on cloud computing are in progress. They will be defended this year (2016).
D7.4 Final Exploitation Plan 32
6.4. Politecnico di Milano
Partner Profile Polimi is one of the Technical Universities in Italy. It was established in 1863 and is ranked as one of the most outstanding European universities in Engineering, Architecture and Industrial Design. Polimi participates in this project through members of Dipartimento di Elettronica, Informazione e Bioingegneria (DEIB), belonging specifically to the Dependable Evolvable Pervasive Software Engineering (DEEPSE) group. DEEP-SE has been ran0ked among the internationally excellent groups in the software engineering area by a recent international peer review20. The research activity of the DEEP-SE group focuses on techniques, tools, and frameworks for the development and run-time management of complex software systems. It encompasses a variety of aspects of such systems, ranging from modelling and analysis issues in the early phases of their development, to issues related to their implementation and run-time management.
The DEEP-SE group has been and is involved in major projects in the software engineering research area, in some cases in collaboration with the CEFRIEL research centre. Among others, we can mention: MODAClouds (as coordinator), SeCSE, SLA@SOI, Q-IMPRESS, MOTION, Future Home, MAIS, CASCADAS, MOMOCS, the S-Cube NoE, the ERC SMScom project.
Within SeaClouds, Polimi offers its experience within the Cloud computing context and contributes mainly within the integration work package (WP5), which it is leading, and within the research work packages WP3, mainly focusing on the definition of the Application Model and on the Planning algorithm, and WP4, mainly contributing with the experience on multi-cloud monitoring acquired within the MODAClouds project.
Exploitable Results For Polimi, the main exploitable asset is the experience acquired within the project while experimenting with various cloud solutions, developing the Application Model, the planning algorithm based on non-functional properties, and incorporating within the SeaClouds runtime platform the monitoring features offered by the MODAClouds solution. A secondary result is the possibility to study the SeaClouds community while conducting its open source development. This result will be beneficial as part of a research work on socio- technical software development environments.
Target Audience Our customers are: Master and PhD students Other researchers gaining advantage from our results and allowing us to spread and adopt our results Developers getting advantage from our deep knowledge on many different clouds. Cloud providers that can gain some competitive advantage by offering to their customers’ tools and guidelines for preventing vendor lock-in.
Exploitation Strategy As a research partner, Polimi foresees the following exploitation possibilities:
20 Ren, J. and Taylor, R. N. 2007. Automatic and versatile publications ranking for research institutions and scholars. Commun. ACM 50, 6 (Jun.2007), 81-85. D7.4 Final Exploitation Plan 33
1. Education: exploit the knowledge gained in the project to develop new courses and specialization curricula for its students and new research topics for its PhD students. 2. Research: build new research initiatives and projects from the SeaClouds results. 3. Services to enterprises: offer consultancy services to enterprises, especially SME, willing to move to the cloud and establish good working relationships with ICT companies operating in the cloud computing area.
Consistently with the above possibilities, Polimi defines the following exploitation plan: ● Build teaching material and courses to support our master students at Polimi as well as employees of external institutions. While cloud computing is becoming more and more important for enterprises and public administrations, the university course program at Polimi does not fully address yet the issues related to the development and operation of a Cloud system. We consider this as an important gap that should be addressed. Thus, we are building a course focusing on how to engineer applications in the Cloud and multi-Clouds and on how to model and assess QoS (Quality of Service) properties. This course will be offered in two versions, one for our master and PhD students more focused on technical aspects, another more focused on enterprises and decomposable in various ways to address the needs of various kinds of audience. ● Develop a Cloud computing lab at Polimi (PoliCloud), in order to support the development of new research projects, to apply for new grants, to extend the resources we can offer to new PhD students and Postdoc, and to increase our competences. ● Extend our contacts with enterprises for consultancy services in the area of cloud computing.
The identified KPIs for the Politecnico di Milano are: 1. At least one course on cloud computing offered to graduate or undergraduate students. 2. The PoliCloud lab fully functional. 3. At least a new grant obtained. 4. At least one new consultancy service offered to an enterprise.
Since the definition of the initial exploitation plan, Polimi has been working towards the achievement of the above objectives and KPIs. In particular, the plan-achievement status is the following: As presented in the intermediate report, Polimi has run so far two editions of the PhD course named 090750 - CLOUD COMPUTING FROM A SOFTWARE ENGINEERING PERSPECTIVE. Moreover, teaching materials in courses coded 090931 MIDDLEWARE TECHNOLOGIES FOR DISTRIBUTED SYSTEMS, 089184 SOFTWARE ENGINEERING 2, 095898 COMPUTING INFRASTRUCTURES, and 094754 COMPUTER SYSTEMS also include the most significant aspects that have been learned during the SeaClouds project and are relevant for the courses.
Polimi is working toward the development of PoliCloud lab. This research lab has been approved as one of the official interdepartmental laboratories promoted by Politecnico di Milano and has received 140.000 Euros of funding from Polimi itself plus hardware donations from Yahoo and IBM. The first cloud nodes are already being used for experimentation. It is planned to install SeaClouds Platform on PoliCloud and offer it as SaaS to our students and researchers for their experiments. D7.4 Final Exploitation Plan 34
Polimi is a partner of DICE project -Developing Data-Intensive Cloud Applications with Iterative Quality Enhancements-. DICE is an EU H2020 research and innovation project (grant agreement No. 644869) from 2015 to 2018. DICE and SeaClouds projects share some of their research goals, as deployment of Cloud Applications and analysis of the expected QoS of the deployed applications. DICE project can benefit from experiences gathered during SeaClouds.
Polimi has started a new collaboration with a consulting firm in the topic of Cloud Computing and DevOps. This collaboration offers consultancy services to financial and telecommunications. SeaClouds experiences are exploited in the part of Cloud Computing consultancy service.
Polimi is part of CEFRIEL consortium (www.cefriel.it), which gives courses to enterprises. SeaClouds experiences are exploited in these courses as Polimi trains the staff of companies on the engineering of applications for the cloud.
6.5. Nurogames
Partner profile Nurogames GmbH (NURO) is a software development company focused on high quality games, gamification solutions and research. Both, customers’ products and their own productions are on the market and in deployment state. Many platforms are supported by NURO, from smart phones and tablets through PC‘s and gaming consoles up to server based solutions. Supported operating systems are android, iOS, Windows, OS X, Linux and others. The actual main product lines are games, based on cross platform clients with web based game servers. Web based products as game servers are having a volatile usage depending on factors as time of day, region, holidays, weather, events, marketing and features. See D6.1.
NUROS actual deployment 7 games are in open beta state and 4 test systems deployed as virtual machines on just one dedicated server with 8 cores and 16GB ram. The price of this machine is 60€ per month. One game in cooperation with a TV company is deployed in the cloud by Amazon. As described in D7.2 and D6.1 a web based game has a volatile usage and the cloud offers a future prove technology. Finding the right balance between price and power is one feature of SeaClouds NURO expects.
Exploitable results The most valuable results that this project will provide to NURO are knowledge and techniques for deploying their game servers to flexible, reliable cloud based platforms with simplified administration effort and fair pricing.
Within this project it was vindicated to achieve this with cloud deployments, an orchestration tool as SeaClouds is intended to be, is essential.
D7.4 Final Exploitation Plan 35
NUROs operational Team was excited by the modular design of SeaClouds and plans to us the outcome of the SeaClouds Project as a whole or just some components of it.
If the advantage of using an integrated system should be self-explanatory, it is a matter of the fact the cloud is under fast forward development and it is a great option of flexibility offered by the open design of SeaClouds to step in the gaps of future opportunities, if they were not under account by the design time of the project.
The discoverer is a great source to get quick overview of many cloud offerings and the stand alone web interface http://seaclouds.di.unipi.it/draco.html is an easy to use tool.
The GUI is a light weight tool to generate blue prints for AAMs and DAMs. For a company as NURO it is very helpful to get automated support to step over the gap of knowledge. Also QoS and SLA monitoring are functionalities needed in many setups.
Last but not least Apache Brooklyn as heart of the deployment module is a master candidate to fulfill the expectations as described in D7.3, to manage test scenarios of NURO application server deployments.
The NURO case study components, developed for this project, are use full for monitoring and benchmarking tests. By their flexible design they are agnostic to the kind of deployment and NURO is evaluating to implement them permanently into their application server infrastructure.
Evolving new B2B products based on cloud techniques is under consideration as outcome of this project.
Target Audience NURO target audience would be gamers using NURO’s games with reliable servers even in boom and burst scenarios. NURO also focuses on B2B customers or research projects, looking for partners with cloud computing expertise.
Exploitation Strategy There are three expected advantages for NURO by the SeaClouds Project:
a. Improvement of own products In order to exploit the results of the SeaClouds Project, NURO will improve their game engines to a cloud friendly design and deploy their game servers to cloud based solutions based on the knowledge gained by the project.
SeaClouds idea of enhanced multi cloud management and cross cloud scaling is very interesting for a company as NURO to step beyond the limitations of existing solutions.
b. Saving money and administrative effort Compared with dedicated resources, cloud solutions are expensive on the one hand but more flexible to scale and offering additional infrastructure. NURO is planning to evaluate if SeaClouds can help to scale to the best balance between power and cost. Also the exploitation of private resources management is under consideration.
D7.4 Final Exploitation Plan 36
NURO expects SeaClouds System or single components of it to save administrative effort.
The functionalities of planning, deployment and monitoring are main tasks of system administration and should be improved by the outcome of the project.
Moving servers from one hosting or cloud provider to another without a tool set an undesired waste of effort.
Using PaaS or IaaS solutions instead of dedicated servers is expected to save administrative costs.
With a clever scaling also resources can be saved and the promised you pay what you use can become true.
c. Expansion of business As a result of the SeaClouds project NURO is planning to acquire projects with cloud focus.
As announced in D7.3 NURO expected some soft indicators of a project success based on the experiences gained by the project.
It turned out scaling in the cloud for LAMP systems is in a mixed state. Vertical scaling was expected to be a simple standard solution and it turned out the actual focus is on horizontal scaling.
This technique works well with a classical web server cluster but the MySQL family is just outgrowing its infancy by the end of the project [http://thenewstack.io/mariadbs-latest- release-illustrates-the-new-demand-to-run-databases-in-containers/].
In the begin of the project, NURO expected to find a good PaaS offering for MySQL but several testing on offerings, promising vertical MySQL scaling, AWS/RDS as an example, turned out to use failover techniques with bad impact on the service. In the end of the project we started to rethink in management of IaaS solutions with replication.
Achievement of KPIs announced in D7.3: improved 3 NUROS Game Engines by integrating the case studies components one quiz game is deployed on a cloud solution
Partly achieved Keeping the average response time of two seconds in a boom simulation by SeaClouds is trickier than expected.
Not achieved yet find a cloud provider with fair pricing
For NURO the SeaClouds Project is just the first step to exploit the clouds opportunities. Based on the SeaClouds Project, NURO can identify a high potential of innovation for further projects, load prediction and bottle neck detection seemed to be a challenge of the future.
D7.4 Final Exploitation Plan 37
The idea of a SeaClouds Alliance to go beyond the projects achievements seems to have a high potential to NURO.
6.6. Cloudsoft
Partner profile Cloudsoft is the leading open-source management company, with their mission to bring business to the cloud. Cloudsoft’s objective is to accelerate cloud adoption by providing enterprises with a software solution that lets them exploit cloud without losing control. The Cloudsoft Application Management Platform (AMP) is the only autonomic open source multi-cloud application management solution built for enterprise. AMP simplifies the modelling, monitoring and management of applications: enabling application migration, accelerating the development of cloud first applications; and delivering policy-based application elasticity, scalability and portability.
Exploitable results The Apache Brooklyn (incubating) open-source project is the heart of AMP, and Cloudsoft are committed to expanding the Apache Brooklyn ecosystem through its customers and supporting open-source contributors. Cloudsoft views SeaClouds as an important piece of that ecosystem, as SeaClouds is driving innovation and contributions to the Apache project, and it is building out a wealth of new capabilities in the form of the SeaClouds solution. Both are commercially exploitable by Cloudsoft. Of particular note are: SeaClouds supporting TOSCA specifications and integrating with Apache Brooklyn gives more options for interoperable standard-based solutions. Platform-as-a-service targets supported through Apache Brooklyn, by integrating the CloudFoundry-location developed for the SeaClouds´ Deployer. SeaClouds leveraging MODAClouds and integrating with Apache Brooklyn gives more options for monitoring and deriving aggregate metrics for better performances and SLAs. Matchmaking capabilities (available through SeaClouds as an extension to Apache Brooklyn) simplify the creation and use of Apache Brooklyn blueprints.
Target Audience Cloudsoft works closely with large enterprises to support open-source cloud application management and with many ISV’s to develop blueprints for their software ensuring their portability in reliability in a wide range of environments. We expect both groups above to be extremely interested in the new features delivered as part of the SeaClouds project. In addition, Cloudsoft’s long-term success is increased by growth and success of the Apache Brooklyn open-source project. We expect that the exciting activity and new functionality of SeaClouds will attract more developers and users to the Brooklyn community, as Apache Brooklyn is one of the key pieces in the SeaClouds solution.
Exploitation strategy Cloudsoft will continue to sell commercial support and consultancy services around Cloudsoft AMP and Apache Brooklyn. New features in SeaClouds will be available as open- source extensions to Apache Brooklyn, increasing adoption and participation in the Apache Brooklyn community (non-commercial exploitation but with marketing and sustainability benefits to the company). Many of the new features enabled by SeaClouds will be included D7.4 Final Exploitation Plan 38
with commercial support in AMP, de-risking their use for large enterprises and making Cloudsoft’s AMP more attractive and powerful. (This is the “support-based open-source” commercial exploitation model as discussed in the previous chapter.) Cloudsoft may also consider offering either the “as-a-service” exploitation route and/or the “strategic consultancy” depending on the richness of the quality-of-service metrics collected. Cloudsoft anticipate that the next 24 months will demonstrate: Growing the Apache Brooklyn community, aided in part by the attraction of SeaClouds: o a 3-fold increase in the size of the Apache Brooklyn contributors base o promotion of Apache Brooklyn to a top-level Apache project Users of functionality developed as part of SeaClouds o 12 ISV Apache Brooklyn blueprints leveraging SeaClouds features o 6 commercial AMP blueprints leveraging SeaClouds features
7. Conclusions
The numerous efforts made by all the partners of the consortium along the project lifecycle have contributed to SeaClouds reaching the end of the funding period with a very positive balance. These efforts have covered different aspects of the project, including technical developments, dissemination and communication of the project achievements and supporting the exploitation work, which has sought maximizing the impact of the project and its adoption by our potential stakeholders. Proof of these is the wide range of papers published, events and conferences attended or workshops organized, as described on deliverable D1.5.3 Dissemination report.
Besides the dissemination activities, from the technical point of view, the project has also evolved positively, reaching the M30 with the final version of the integrated platform released. This new and more mature version, with added-value functionalities will be very useful for the engagement of new adopters, since will allow the SeaClouds Alliance to showcase the project with greater success guarantees. This assumption is based on the positive feedback obtained on both industrial workshops celebrated by SeaClouds (on Cloud World Forum and Cloud Expo Europe) and the exploitation opportunities aroused from them.
Precisely because of that positive feedback and the interest generated on potential adopters, that the consortium has decided to extend the SeaClouds project through the SeaClouds Alliance, whether this involves creating it from scratch or joining the MultiClouds Devops Alliance described in section 4. The objective of this Alliance is not exploiting jointly the SeaClouds solution, at least not in the sense of creating a new venture to offer a service. Instead, the objective is to work together to continue the technical development of the solution (at both component and general level) and the promotion of the project (and its achievements). As described on the MoU, actions to be carried out within this Alliance include (besides the technical work) the promotion of the project outcomes through attendance to events, paper publications, generation and promotion of commercial and demonstration videos, update and improvement of the project website, etc.
The improved maturity level of the solution and the marketing campaign put in place by the Alliance, will allow the partners not only to obtain better results at internal level but also to D7.4 Final Exploitation Plan 39
resume the exploitation opportunities aroused during the project (as Ormuco, IBM, Cloudyn, UBS AB, Cloudify, etc.). On this regard, important milestones have been already achieved as described on section 3.2. The technical enhancements that SeaClouds have already provided to real tools which are currently in the market like Apache Brooklyn or the inclusion of SeaClouds on the Canopy Incubation program are clear examples of real adoption, and therefore, of the impact that SeaClouds has generated so far. Other impacts that shouldn’t be underestimated are the contributions to vendor-driven standards as OASIS TOSCA or the creation of the PaaS Support Library, which constitute the SeaClouds´ two cents to advance the current State of The Art.
The work performed by the consortium will continue in the following months. An example of this will be the participation of SeaClouds on the next edition of the NetFutures conference, to be held in Brussels in April 2016. There, the SeaClouds platform will be showcased to a wide audience from both industry and academia, which will open new possibilities for SeaClouds adoption and for collaboration with other EU projects. In this sense, project the participation in the Cluster on Software Engineering for Cloud Services and Applications [12] has been (and will continue being) an important leverage for the SeaClouds adoption.
Once the SeaClouds Alliance comes to an end, a report with all the efforts performed and the main achievements will be published and made available on the project´s website.
D7.4 Final Exploitation Plan 40
Annex A
Memorandum of Understanding
Between
ATOS
Universidad de Malaga (UMA)
Universitá di Pisa (UPI)
Politecnico di Milano (POLIMI)
Nurogames (NURO)
And
Cloudsoft
This Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) between the Atos, UMA, UPI, Polimi, NURO and Cloudsoft sets for the terms and understanding to the joint efforts to support and promote the results of the European project SeaClouds.
Rationale SeaClouds is an FP7 ICT Call 10 project (nr. 610531) that aims at providing Seamless Adaptive Multi-cloud Management of Service based Applications. Due to the great potential foreseen for the SeaClouds solution, the consortium has decided to continue collaborating beyond the funding period completion (March 2016) for the evolution and promotion of the project outcomes, for which it’s necessary the definition of this document.
1. Goals and objectives The purpose of this Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) is to define some basic rules of understanding which will allow the partners to continue supporting the development and promotion of the project while the SeaClouds Alliance is still in place.
For clarity, this Memorandum of Understanding does not alter any rights already conferred on parties through which they can exploit the Foreground arising from the Project through the Grant Agreement, Consortium Agreement or any other legal agreement(s) between the parties.
D7.4 Final Exploitation Plan 41
2. General terms of the MoU
Duration This MoU shall become operational upon signature by all the parties (the Effective Date) and shall continue in full force for an initial term of at least one year commencing on the Effective Date. This agreement shall be automatically renewed at the end of the initial term for successive one year periods, unless all remaining parties agree to terminate the agreement. If a given party leaves the SeaClouds Alliance, the MoU shall be automatically terminated. In that case, the withdrawing party should give a written notice of four weeks to the coordinating party. Termination shall not affect any rights or obligations of a party leaving the MoU incurred prior to the date of termination, unless otherwise agreed between the SeaClouds Alliance and the leaving party.
Coordination In order to carry out and to fulfil the aims of this agreement, each party will appoint the appropriated person(s) to represent its organization and to coordinate the required activities. The overall coordination will be led by Atos, the SeaClouds coordinator.
Meetings and reporting To accomplish the purpose and objectives set forth on the MoU, the partners will set periodical teleconferences (once a month) to analyse the status and current needs of the project. The project coordinator (Atos) will be responsible for generating the corresponding minutes and report them to the other partners.
Financial considerations All the partners involved on the SeaClouds Alliance intend to provide the required resources (whether they are human or technical) to support the development of SeaClouds, during the duration of the Alliance and according to their own needs. The Alliance provides a forum for the partners to report and compare their needs in order to identify synergies, with the intention of sharing commonly required work and ultimately maintaining a single, simple, unforked code base to the maximum extent possible.
Confidentiality The confidentiality clauses of the consortium agreement remain in vigour for a period of 5 years from the effective date of the consortium agreement. Upon its expiry the Alliance partners will negotiate a renewal of this clause.
Roles and Responsibilities ATOS will coordinate the Alliance under the same principles as the project was managed, following the procedures and obligations set out in the GA and CA. Therefore, all the issues related to decisions making and conflict resolution will be resolved through the same mechanisms used during the funding period.
The involved parties intend on a best effort basis to: o Regularly attend scheduled meetings o Share relevant information across the Alliance D7.4 Final Exploitation Plan 42
o Make timely decisions and take required actions so as not to hold the project development. o Notify the other parties as soon as a practical, if any matter arises which may be deemed to affect the development of this partnership.
Each one of the involved parties intends to support the dissemination of the project results through activities such as: o Attending events and conferences during the period defined on the MoU. o Publishing, at least, one paper/article on a scientific journal (in the case of the academic partners). o Publishing, at least, a business-oriented whitepaper with the outcomes generated during this period (in the case of industrial partners). o Generating the required assets (poster, flyers, presentations, etc.) to support the dissemination of the project and the attendance to the mentioned events and conferences.
The different partners shall estimate the human resources necessary to fulfil activities in the work plan and shall seek commitment from Members. The partners cannot commit human resources to SeaClouds Alliance activities without agreement from partners who control those resources.
Any dispute concerning the subject matter of this document is to be settled by full and frank discussion and negotiation between the parties.
An Alliance Member which can show that its own work, time for performance, costs, liabilities, intellectual property rights or other legitimate interests would be significantly affected by a decision of a Consortium Body may exercise a veto with respect to the corresponding decision or relevant part of the decision
Any addendum to this MoU shall be in writing and signed by all parties.
Intellectual Property Management in the SeaClouds Alliance
Since the SeaClouds solution follows an open source approach with a non-restrictive license (Apache 2.0) there are no IPR issues to be considered.
D7.4 Final Exploitation Plan 43
For the intention of doubt, this Memorandum of Understanding is not a legally binding document. It serves to set out the intentions of the partners towards establishing a sustainable vehicle for the future. Fulfilment of the intentions discussed within this MoU is conditional on the successful negotiation of the legally binding terms and conditions relating to the Alliance.
Signatures
Contact Information Date: ______Partner name ATOS Partner Daniel Field representative Position Head of IT Sector Signature: ______Atos Research & Innovation Address Avenida Diagonal, 200 08018 Barcelona Telephone +34 93 486 1818 Fax +34 93 486 0766
Email [email protected]
Contact Information Partner name Universidad de Malaga Partner Date: ______Ernesto Pimentel representative
Position Full Professor E.T.S. Ingeniería Informática. Signature: ______Address Boulevard Louis Pasteur, 35. 29010 Málaga. Spain
Telephone +34 952 131 396 Fax +34 952 131 397 Email [email protected]
Contact Information Partner name Universitá di Pisa Partner Date: ______Antonio Brogi representative Position Full Professor Address Largo B. Pontecorvo, 3 Signature: ______I-56127. Pisa. Italy
Telephone +39 050 221 2790 Fax +39 050 2212726 Email [email protected] D7.4 Final Exploitation Plan 44
Contact Information Partner name Politecnico di Milano Date: ______Partner Elisabetta Di Nitto representative Position Associate Professor Address Dipartamento di Elettronica e Informazione Piazza Leonardo da Vinci 32, Signature: ______20133, Milan, Italy Telephone +39 022 399 3663 Fax +39 022 399 3574
Email [email protected]
Contact Information Partner name Nurogames Partner Date: ______Jens Piesk representative Position Manager Address Schaafenstraße 25, Signature: ______50676 Köln, Germany
Telephone +49 221 398 80846 Fax +49 221 398 8004 Email [email protected]
Contact Information Partner name Cloudsoft Corporation Partner Date: ______Duncan Johnston-Watt representative Position CEO Address CodeBase Argyle House Signature: ______3 Lady Lawson Street
EH3 9DR Edinburgh. Scotland Telephone +44 131 560 1288 Fax N/A Email [email protected] D7.4 Final Exploitation Plan 45
References
[1] Third European Conference on Service-Oriented and Cloud Computing, September 2nd – 4th, 2014. London, UK. https://www.scenic.uma.es/workshops/seaclouds2014/
[2] Fourth European Conference on Service-Oriented and Cloud Computing. September 15th – 17th, 2015. Taormina, Italy. http://esocc2015.unime.it/
[3] Cloud World Forum. June 24th-25th. 2015. London, UK. http://cloudanddevopswf.com/
[4] Cloud Expo Europe Frankfurt. November 10th & 11th, 2015. Frankfurt. http://www.cloudexpoeurope.de/
[5] Cloudify, cloud orchestration and automation made easy. http://getcloudify.org/
[6] Alien4Cloud, Application LifeCycle Enabler for Cloud. http://alien4cloud.github.io/
[7] Apache license 2.0. http://www.apache.org/licenses/LICENSE-2.0
[8] Cloudyn, Cloud Management Platform. https://www.cloudyn.com/
[9] UBS AG. https://www.ubs.com/
[10] Github repository. https://github.com/
[11] Apache foundation. http://www.apache.org/
[12] Cluster on Software Engineering for Cloud Services and Applications. https://eucloudclusters.wordpress.com/software-engineering-for-services-and- applications/
[13] Cloudsoft Press Release: “Drag and Drop TOSCA support for Apache Brooklyn with Alien4Cloud”. http://www.Cloudsoftcorp.com/blog/2016/01/drag-and-drop-tosca-support- for-apache-brooklyn-with-alien4cloud/
[14] Brooklyn-TOSCA Github repository. https://github.com/Cloudsoft/brooklyn-tosca
[15] Canopy Press Release: “Key Compose component becomes a Top-Level Open Source project”. https://canopy-cloud.com/news/key-compose-component-becomes-top-level- open-source-project
[16] OASIS CAMP TC Members. https://www.oasis- open.org/committees/membership.php?wg_abbrev=camp
[17] OASIS TOSCA TC Members. https://www.oasis- open.org/committees/tc_home.php?wg_abbrev=tosca
[18] Apache Brooklyn. https://brooklyn.apache.org/
[19] JClouds https://jclouds.apache.org/ D7.4 Final Exploitation Plan 46
[20] MODAClouds: Model-driven Approach for design and execution of applications on multiple clouds. http://www.modaclouds.eu/
[21] Openshift. https://www.openshift.com/
[22] Cloud Foundry. https://www.cloudfoundry.org/
[23] Pivotal. http://pivotal.io/
[24] Canopy. https://canopy-cloud.com/
[25] IBM BlueMix. http://www.ibm.com/cloud-computing/bluemix/
[26] HP PaaS. http://www8.hp.com/us/en/cloud/hphelion-platform.html
[27] Heroku. https://www.heroku.com/
[28] RightScale “State of the cloud report, 2016”. http://www.gartner.com/newsroom/id/2599315
[29] Gartner report about hybrid cloud. http://www.gartner.com/newsroom/id/2599315
[30] Forbes report on “Roundup of cloud computing forecast and market estimates, 2016”. http://www.forbes.com/sites/louiscolumbus/2016/03/13/roundup-of-cloud-computing- forecasts-and-market-estimates-2016/#2689d37574b0
[31] Cloud Times article about IDC report on PaaS market. http://cloudtimes.org/2013/11/15/idc-says-worldwide-paas-market-is-growing-rapidly-and- reach-14-billion-by-2017/
[32] Multi-Cloud DevOps Alliance. http://multiclouddevops.com/
[33] Modelio modeling tool. https://www.modelio.org/