Contrail, Virtual Execution Platform, ConPaaS, Snooze

Contrail http://contrail-project.eu was a Cloud Federation computing project led by Christine Morin (Inria/Myriads) that ran from 2010-10-01 until 2014-01-31 and was financed by the EU under the FP7 framework. The main contribution of Contrail is an integrated approach to virtualization, offering Infrastructure-as-a-Service, services for IaaS Cloud Federation, and Platform-as-a- Service.

Virtual Execution Platform (VEP) [Y. JÉGOU, P. HARSH, R. CASCELLA, C. MORIN. Open Computing Infrastructures for Elastic Services: Contrail Federation, in "Invitation to a Journey in the ERA of Cloud Computing", D. PETCU, J. L. VÁZQUEZ-POLETTI (editors), Cambridge & Scholars Publishing, January 2012, http://hal.inria.fr/hal-00717422] is a Contrail service that sits just above IaaS layer at the service provider end of the Contrail cloud federation. The VEP service provides a uniform interface for managing the whole lifecycle of elastic applications on the cloud and hides the details of the IaaS layer to the user. VEP applications are described in OVF (Open Virtualization Format) standard format. Resource usage is controlled by CEE (Constrained Execution environment) rules which can be derived from SLAs (Service Level Agreement).

ConPaaS [ G. PIERRE, C. STRATAN. ConPaaS: A Platform for Hosting Elastic Cloud Applications, in "IEEE Internet Computing", 2012, vol. 16, no 5, pp. 88-92] is a runtime environment developed during the Contrail project for hosting applications in the cloud. It aims at offering the full power of the cloud to application developers while shielding them from the associated complexity of the cloud. ConPaaS is designed to host both high-performance scientific applications and online Web applications. It automates the entire life-cycle of an application, including collaborative development, deployment, performance monitoring, and automatic scaling. This allows developers to focus their attention on application-specific concerns rather than on cloud-specific details.

Snooze [ E. FELLER, C. ROHR, D. MARGERY, C. MORIN. Energy Management in IaaS Clouds: A Holistic Approach, in "5th IEEE International Conference on Cloud Computing (CLOUD)", Honolulu, Hawaii, United States, June 2012, http://hal.inria.fr/hal-00695038], [E. FELLER, L. RILLING, C. MORIN. Snooze: A Scalable and Autonomic Virtual Machine Management Framework for Private Clouds, in "12th IEEE/ACM International Symposium on Cluster, Cloud, and Grid Computing (CCGrid 2012)", Ottawa, Canada, May 2012, http://hal.inria.fr/hal-00664621], a novel Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) cloud management system, which is designed to scale across many thousands of servers and virtual machines (VMs) while being easy to configure, highly available, and energy efficient. For scalability, Snooze performs distributed VM management based on a hierarchical architecture. To support ease of configuration and high availability Snooze implements self-configuring and self-healing features. Finally, for energy efficiency, Snooze integrates a holistic energy management approach via VM resource (i.e. CPU, memory, network) utilization monitoring, underload/overload detection and mitigation, VM consolidation (by implementing a modified version of the Sercon algorithm], and power management to transition idle servers into a power saving mode. Snooze is a highly modular software.