During the implementation phase, all components of the Cloud4SOA platform have been implemented. The platform has been developed using JAVA technology in order to in- crease its portability. Specific J2EE patterns have been adopted in order to increase the flexibility during the development and the maintainability in general. The Cloud4SOA consortium tried to vertically modularize the code-organization based on the various functionalities that each component accomplishes. In addition, for a project of this scale
and modularity, it was also mandatory to use build automation techniques. Maven tech- nology uses an XML file to describe the software project being built, its dependencies on other external modules and components, the build order, directories, and required plug- ins making it ideal for the Cloud4SOA purposes. Specifically, the exploitation of MAVEN technology makes the build process easy, provides a uniform build system, provides quality project information, provides guidelines for best practices development and allows transparent migration to new features. Finally, the adoption of Spring Framework v3 simplified the collaboration between the developers thanks to the flexible instantiation methods (i.e. auto-wiring support).
Cloud4SOA is now in an invitation-only Beta phase of its release. In parallel, the project is deploying an offering focused specifically on its PaaS applica- tion/matchmaking service, hosted publically to developers. This will help gain a lar- ger user base and provide a priority service for the fragmented nature of the PaaS market segment. The full multi-Cloud management, monitoring and migration capa- bilities will be rolled out by the project partners in the autumn of 2013. As an open source solution, the full release will be paired by a local implementation of the Cloud4SOA and its adapters available to download from GitHub, giving a flexible choice for developers to leverage the Cloud4SOA system between publically hosted or local versions.
6
Evaluation
The evaluation of a software product is an important phase in the development proc- ess. Cloud4SOA follows a two-fold usability evaluation approach to assert the useful- ness of the Cloud4SOA system: i) implementation of three proof-of-concept showcases based on real-life business scenarios and ii) an extensive Beta program which taps the project’s PaaS developer and vendor stakeholders.
Additionally, we designed and conducted system performance studies to estimate capacity of the existing closed beta deployment and learn the ways of scaling Cloud4SOA’s services for higher demands.
6.1 Internal Evaluation via Industry Showcases
In showcase #1, Portugal Telecom Inovação (PTIN)16, the research and development part of Portugal Telecom Group (PT), has developed the business intelligence show- case. PTIN has created a context-aware multimedia framework. Within the framework, a XMPP server has an active role in the processes performed by 3 service enablers that have been re-designed based on SOA concepts. Following this development, PTIN has ported, through Cloud4SOA, these services from the framework to several PaaS provid- ers recommend and supported by Cloud4SOA. The deployment and on-demand migra- tion of context-aware multimedia services to different PaaS providers has enabled the seamless integration with services deployed in the same or different Clouds and with profiling and location tracking services exposed from the PTIN’s infrastructure, offering to the mobile end-users high capacity value-added services.
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In showcase #2, the Fraunhofer Institute for Applied Information Technology (FIT)17 has implemented the industrial business collaboration showcase. Specifically, FIT has adapted the existing Basic Support for Cooperative Work (BSCW) 18 application to be deployed via the Cloud4SOA system as a Cloud-enabled service on a PaaS platform with the final goal of an efficient execution and effective governance of the BSCW service on a PaaS platform. The interoperability of different BSCW servers would be enabled on a back-end and file store level reducing administration overhead and providing users who work on different servers a seamless cooperation environment.
ROMTELECOM19 has implemented the existing VPN Portal as the network- monitoring showcase in the Cloud4SOA project. Virtual Private Network (VPN) Por- tal is a customer-facing portal that presents to the customers information and reports available in several internal systems and allows to view and manage incident tickets. Parts of the VPN Portal have been ported on a PaaS in order to be easily integrated with other portals. The showcase has developed and tested the effectiveness of the portability of the customer-facing interfaces in the Cloud, the separation of the pres- entation interfaces from the computational-intensive algorithms and from the internal databases, and the ad-hoc migration of parts of the application among different Cloud infrastructures, in the same time testing the effectiveness of using a proprietary data- base in “cloudified” applications.
A valuable continuous feedback has been provided during all the phases of the sys- tem development helping to resolve inconsistencies between designers’ and users’ mental models, and adjust the system architecture. The aspects touched by this early feedback include but are not limited by PaaS adapters’ architecture design and devel- opment, application deployment flows (e.g. Git-based deployment implementation), design of UI (e.g. GUI or CLI), design of the monitoring subsystem.
6.2 Performance Studies
An important aspect of the Cloud4SOA evaluation is performance evaluation that aims to collect and disseminate the data related to system performance under a real- life workload. This step has been performed before the launch of the external Beta program in order to avoid hitting the performance issues after opening the system to a wider sample of Cloud4SOA stakeholders.
The performance studies follow a common design similar to every web-based ap- plication. First, a workload model is created and expressed in terms of use-cases of using the Cloud4SOA web-based GUI by an end-user. The workload model includes parameters to define the number of simultaneous end-users working with the Cloud4SOA system, user-thinking time between the subsequence requests and full load ramp-up period.
The performance studies help us to learn more about the limits of the current de- ployment of the Cloud4SOA and the possible ways of scaling different components of the system. 17 http://www.fit.fraunhofer.de/en.html 18 https://public.bscw.de/pub/ 19 http://www.romtelecom.ro/
6.3 Cloud4SOA Stakeholder Beta Program
The goal of the final external evaluation is to assert Cloud4SOA added-value services usefulness on a significant sample of end-users invited to an early beta access to the system.
Through a campaign of industry events, developer conferences and workshops, the project has already begun to gather direct feedback based on its Beta release. One such set of comments that has influenced the initial Cloud4SOA deployment model is based on developer priorities of today compared to an evolving PaaS market that will mature in the next few years. For example, the Cloud4SOA application-to-provider matchmaking capability has received much more interest than anticipated, especially for a project focused more on the actual alleviation of vendor lock-in (i.e. the Cloud4SOA’s migration capability). As such, Cloud4SOA is releasing a standalone platform matchmaking service in order to offer an immediate added-value for devel- opers in the fragmented PaaS market of today, which is helping build momentum and user-base for the full post-Beta release of the Cloud4SOA later in 2013 with the more advanced multi-PaaS management and migration capabilities.
This combination of an extensive invitation-only current Beta (representing the full matchmaking, management, monitoring and migration capabilities) and the fully public platform matchmaking standalone, Cloud4SOA is currently receiving a broad external evaluation for its release schedule, feature set rollout and future market deployment.