Cafe

Current Team

The project is led by the Cyber Security Lab in the University of Waikato, New Zealand. We welcome interested, like-minded volunteer software developers to embark on this journey to make OpenStack resources manageable from a time-based and user-centric perspective.

Members from the Cyber Security Lab, University of Waikato, New Zealand (https://crow.org.nz):

Ryan Ko , Alan Tan, Grace Ng, Brad Cowie

Contacts: Alan Tan (yst1@waikato.ac.nz), Ryan Ko (ryan@waikato.ac.nz)

Summary

Café is a time-based resource booking system for OpenStack clouds. As it is time-based, booked resources can be relinquished back to the cloud resource pool after the booked time is up. Café is designed for cloud environments such as clouds for educational purposes, research clouds available for lease, and private clouds with large number of users. Some of the features of Café include:

• Simplified graphical interface for monitoring usage of cloud resources for a large group of users through a time-table style of viewing resource bookings and allocations for specific time/date.
• Ability to allow administrators to plan and understand the current utility of hardware and identify the need for future expansions.
• Time-slot based cloud resource management. Allow users (e.g. students) to plan when they want to use the resources. This also helps to avoid the problem of block bookings and hence increase utility of hardware resources.
• Warning alerts for users when the booked session is about to end.
• Enables administrators to optimise up/down time of resources in order to achieve energy optimisation with respect to performance of vms and customer requests.