CaaS

• Created: yoko
• Contributors: nii
• Blueprint: https://blueprints.launchpad.net/nova/+spec/cluster-as-a-service

Cluster as a Service: Managing multiple clusters for openstack clouds and other diverse frameworks

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Overview

Cluster computing has become popular in academia and industry. Clusters of commodity servers are used for variety of distributed applications like simulation, data analysis, web services and so on. None of frameworks can fit to every distributed application. Even openstack cloud framework cannot, because, some researchers want to deploy hadoop clusters on bear metal servers for performance issues, for example. One solution for this problem is to assign one layer below IaaS/PaaS layer to handle cluster deployment. That is Cluster as a Service layer which is used for allocating several or many servers for frameworks.

User stories

In an academic institution, researchers had been using their own computing resources for each purpose. That was fine until the power shortage became real. The director of the institution asked a cloud research group to develop a research cloud on which every researchers can move their computer clusters. Some of the research group use HPC clusters and others use Hadoop clusters. Quite a few groups has providing web services to public. The usage pattern of each cluster is different for each other and varies according to the time of the day, the day of the week etc.

So, the resource allocation to each cluster has to be dynamic if the power consumption critically matters.

Design

• Requirements
  • Dynamic resource allocation for each cluster
  • Secure isolation among clusters
  • Enough performance and capacity for each cluster
• Design sketch
  • Separation between IaaS/PaaS layer and CaaS layer
  • IaaS/PaaS layer can scale on the fly
  • CaaS layer machine images can be handled efficiently by container
  • CaaS layer is a web service
  • Network isolation by taggedVLAN
  • Automatic package installation

Implementation

Implementation example is the following:

Test/Demo Plan

The current demonstration video can be seen at http://wiki.openstack.org/CaaS_demo

Discussion

http://etherpad.openstack.org/cluster-as-a-service-discussion

Unresolved issues

This project is quite related to MultiClusterZones but have not contacted to the project.

http://wiki.openstack.org/MultiClusterZones

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