Raffaele Di Fazio

Connecting to the CloudsCloud Brokers and OCCI.

Raffaele Di Fazio

Overview

• The Broker, components and architecture

• jOCCI: an OCCI Java implementation

• The “Connector Project”

• A full overview

November 2012 - 2

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Disclaimer

• My visibility on the projects was limited.

• I was just asked to design and develop with a general overview

of the goals.

• I do NOT have any details about European projects involved

with the cloud broker nor any of the other parts I will show to

you.

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The Broker

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The Broker: a cloud perspective

• A cloud broker is an intermediary between the customer and a

cloud provider.

• The goal of a Cloud Broker is:

• To be able to provide a unified interface to manage multiple

cloud providers.

• To simplify the choice for the customer.

• To try to understand the need of the customer and to find the

provider that best suits its needs.

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The Broker: a cloud perspective

• Can have different goals based on the user request:

• Try to minimize the costs.

• Try to give the fastest service (i.e. deploying in EU instead of

US)

• The Broker, essentially: propose the user a service.

November 2012 - 6

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Cloud Platforms

• At the beginning: one player (Amazon)

• Now: multiple players, variegated offer.

• Several cloud providers:

• Amazon

• VCloud

• HP Cloud

• Eucalyptus

• …

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Amazon Web Services

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HP Cloud

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OpenStack

• A scalable “operating system” for cloud computing.

• It is used to control “compute, network, storage” resources.

• A “compute” is any information processing resource (i.e. a VM).

• It can be used to control cloud infrastructures. It is a software

suite.

• This leads to multiple custom clouds ( see

http://www.openstack.org/user-stories/)

November 2012 - 10

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Differences btw cloud providers

• Interfaces

• APIs

• Costs

• Way of managing the VMs (i.e. different functionalities)

• Even the terminology used can be different.

• GOAL: simplify this mess!

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Broker + OCCI + Proactive

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OCCI Server ProActive

Cloud Provider

Broker

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Broker + OCCI + Proactive: 2nd architecture

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OCCI Server Broker

Cloud Provider

ProActive

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Broker + OCCI + Proactive: expanded

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OCCI Server ProActive Broker

jOCCI PROCCICloud

connectors

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JOCCI: AN OCCI JAVA LIBRARY

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Dictionary… pay attention!

• OCCI has a particular naming convention we must follow.

• There are very common words that are keywords when

speaking about OCCI.

• Kind, Link, Resource, Attributes, Category are some of them.

• Other classes are: Parser, Server, Model.

• Please be careful!

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OCCI

• OCCI: Open Cloud Computing Interface

• It is a standard for interoperability between cloud platforms.

• GOALS:

• Interoperability: between cloud providers

• Portability: avoid vendor lock-in

• Integration: possibility to support multiple platforms

• Extensibility

November 2012 - 17

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OCCI continued

• Currently focus on IaaS.

• An extension to support PaaS, SaaS is possible.

• It is a set of specifications:

• Core: Model specification

• Rendering: How to structure the OCCI requests

• …

• IN PRACTICE: RESTful protocol for cloud management tasks

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OCCI Core Model

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OCCI implementation – core

• Main classes reflect the OCCI core model:

• Category: basic classes to identify OCCI types

• Kind: type identification system for all the Entities.

• Mixin: extension mechanism for a Kind.

• Action: …

• Entity: abstract type of resource and link types

• Resource: represent a concrete resource and represents

real world instances of VMs, etc.

• Link: association between two resources.November 2012 - 20

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jOCCI

• It is a OCCI server written in Java.

• Born because of the necessity to replace occi4java

• Unsupported, unmaintainable, ugly code.

• Inspired by the design of rOCCI, a ruby based OCCI

implementation.

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jOCCI design goals

• Be extensible

• Model expressed by means of JSONs, defined at runtime.

• Extendible, following OCCI principles.

• No assumption on the backend (more about this later)

• Only supporting OCCI core model by default

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jOCCI implementation

• Made up of two components:

• OCCI Core: contains the definitions of all the classes

representing the OCCI core specifications

• OCCI Server: contains the server, the parser and all the

other classes with functionalities to handle OCCI

requests/responses.

• This makes the development of the specification (CORE) and

the server, decoupled.

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jOCCI core – features

• jOCCI implements only the core classes of the OCCI Model.

• Rough example:

• It defines what are the fields of the Kind class

• It does NOT define which types of Kind we can use (i.e.

Compute)

• This approach makes jOCCI independent from a specific

definition of the instances.

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jOCCI – Server

• Developed using the following technologies:

• Apache Tomcat

• RESTEasy

• Jackson (JSON parsing)

• Completely independent of the backend implementation. This is

loaded at runtime (more about this later).

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jOCCI - Server

• REST interfaces supporting HEAD, GET, POST, PUT, DELETE

HTTP methods.

• OCCI requests are HTTP requests that can be expressed in

different formats.

• Request formats: text/occi, text/plain, application/json, etc.

• The server should be flexible enough to support these different

types.

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Example of OCCI request

• curl -X POST --header 'Content-type:text/occi' --header 'X-

OCCI-Attribute: method=start'

http://localhost:8080/jocci/compute/8432c343-15ec-40ff-bb19-1a

7062a1aa5b?action=start --header 'Category: start; scheme="

http://schemas.ogf.org/occi/infrastructure/compute/action#";

class="action"' -u demo:demo

November 2012 - 27

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Broker + OCCI + Proactive: an Expanded view

November 2012 - 28

OCCI Server ProActive Broker

jOCCI PROCCICloud

connectors

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PROCCIConnecting to ProActive:

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PROCCI

• Procci was created to be integrated with occi4java to allow

ProActive to process OCCI requests.

• These requests are mainly intended to be used to manage

virtual machines.

• The final goal of this interconnection is to be able to speak with

the broker.

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PROCCI

• jOCCI parses OCCI requests.

• Methods exposed by PROCCI are called directly by jOCCI.

• Under the hood, a job is created and it is submitted to the

scheduler.

• After the job is executed, a response is shown to the user

through jOCCI by means of HTTP response.

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PROCCI Connection

• When jOCCI is started, it executes the setup phase.

• In each Action class attach the method implemented by the

backend.

• This allow us to plug the actions to be executed.

• Does not force jOCCI to know the backend.

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PROCCI connection

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THE CONNECTOR PROJECT

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Broker + OCCI + Proactive: an Expanded view

November 2012 - 35

OCCI Server ProActive Broker

jOCCI PROCCICloud

connectors

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The connector project

• We wanted to write several connectors to be able to connect to

multiple cloud providers.

• Connectors are fundamental for the broker.

• It must talk with the cloud service providers.

• Technically they are built on top of APIs to connect to the cloud

providers.

• Not much more to say here!

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A complete example

• A user submit a OCCI request to start an already created virtual

machine.

• jOCCI receives the request. Once processed, it calls PROCCI.

• PROCCI creates a job. The job is submitted to ProActive

scheduler.

• The job is executed. A remote cloud provider is called using a

connector.

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That’s it! Thank you!