Final Report Summary - PAASPORT (A SEMANTICALLY-ENHANCED MARKETPLACE OF INTEROPERABLE PLATFORM-AS-A-SERVICE OFFERINGS FOR THE DEPLOYMENT AND MIGRATION OF BUSINESS APPLICATIONS OF SMEs)
Executive Summary:
The 36-month PaaSport project focused on resolving the data and application portability issues that exist in the Cloud PaaS market through a flexible and efficient deployment and migration approach. To this end, PaaSport specified and deliver a thin, non-intrusive Cloud-broker, to implement the enabling tools and technologies, and to deploy fully operational prototypes and large-scale demonstrators.
PaaSport enables European Cloud vendors (in particular SMEs) to roll out semantically interoperable PaaS offerings leveraging their competitive advantage, the quality of service and value delivered to their customers, and improving their outreach to potential customers, particularly the pan-European software industry. PaaSport also enables European Software SMEs to deploy business applications on the best-matching Cloud PaaS and to seamlessly migrate these applications on demand. PaaSport contributes to aligning and interconnecting heterogeneous PaaS offerings, overcoming the vendor lock-in problem and lowering switching costs.
Project Context and Objectives:
The 36-month PaaSport project focuses on resolving the application portability issues that exist in the Cloud PaaS market through a flexible and efficient deployment and migration approach. To this end, PaaSport is combining Cloud PaaS technologies with lightweight semantics in order to specify and deliver a thin, non-intrusive Cloud-broker (in the form of a Cloud PaaS Marketplace), to implement the enabling tools and technologies, and to deploy fully operational prototypes.
From developers’ perspective, the added value offered by PaaSport is provided by the following:
Easy to use portability and monitoring libraries to develop and monitor portable PaaS services
A marketplace to search for suitable PaaS offerings across industry leading and EU-based cloud providers based on the application, resource and offering requirements.
The marketplace hosts offerings for the following 8 cloud providers: Openshift, Heroku, CloudFoundry, IBM BlueMix, AWS Beanstalk, Apache Stratos, Stackato and CloudControl
Ranked results of PaaS offerings that match user requirements which allow users to easily select the offerings that satisfy best their needs
Real-time, scalable and elastic application monitoring and SLA violation notification service
From a business perspective, PaaSport aims at lifting the barriers that cause the vendor lock-in problem, thus empowering Cloud customers and Cloud application developers (in particular, European SME Software vendors) and allowing them to choose freely the Cloud PaaS offering that best fits their needs. Thus, PaaS providers, and especially the start-ups and SMEs, can also benefit from using PaaSport Marketplace as they are offered with a marketplace that they can join and add their product in order attract more customers to their platform. PaaS providers can use the extended model of PaaSport in order to define all characteristics of their PaaS offering; from infrastructural parameters to defining all the services that are supported by each PaaS. Overall, PaaSport Marketplace can help European Cloud PaaS vendors to increase their competitiveness by providing feedback for improving their offerings and promoting interoperability and standards in the PaaS segment.
PaaSport is also expected to empower the position and it is in line with the European Cloud Initiative that has been recently announced by European Commission and its goal is to strengthen Europe's position in data-driven innovation, improving competitiveness and cohesion, and helping to create a Digital Single Market in Europe. In order to maximize the communities awareness and adoption of the PaaSport results, the PaaSport partners (mainly the participating Software SME Associations) are following a European-wide dissemination strategy.
Led by the German ICT Federation BiTMI, the PaaSport consortium consists of twelve (12) partners, from seven (7) EU member states and associated countries, i.e. Germany, Sweden, Latvia, Turkey, Greece and Cyprus.
The results of PaaSport include (both reports and prototypes):
R1. the open PaaSport Cloud-broker Architecture, which will drive the creation of a semanticallyinteroperable PaaS offerings marketplace across the enlarged Europe, taking into consideration the business requirements of the European software SMEs;
R2. the innovative PaaSport Marketplace Infrastructure for semantically-interconnected Cloud PaaS offerings, facilitating the publication and advertisement of available Cloud PaaS offerings, the identification and recommendation of the best-matching PaaS offering, and the seamless business application deployment and migration. The PaaSport Marketplace comprises of three (3) core components (subsystems):
the PaaSport PaaS Offerings Recommendation Layer (R2.a) that facilitates the discovery, short-listing and recommendation of the most suitable and appropriate PaaS offering (registered at the PaaSport marketplace), based on the semantic profile of the application to be deployed;
the PaaSport Governance and Monitoring Layer (R2.b) that implements the core management functionalities offered by the PaaSport platform, such as the management of the registered PaaS offerings, as well as the monitoring and the lifecycle management of the deployed applications; and
the PaaSport Persistence and Execution Layer (R2.c) that puts in place the infrastructure that allows the registration of the PaaS offering at the PaaSport marketplace and the registration of the semantic profiles of the deployed applications.
Moreover, the PaaSport Marketplace Infrastructure integrates a set of configurable and adaptable (to the user’s context) front-ends that support seamless interaction of the users with the PaaSport functionalities;
R3. the PaaSport Modelling Artefacts and Semantic Models, which serve as the conceptual and modelling pillars of the proposed marketplace infrastructure, comprising of three (3) main models:
the PaaSport Platform as a Service model (R3.a) for enabling the semantic annotation of the available Cloud PaaS offerings in terms of functionalities, resources and business characteristics offered;
the PaaSport Application model (R3.b) for enabling the semantic annotation of the application to be deployed by users through the PaaSport marketplace, in terms of functionalities, resource and business characteristics requirements;
the PaaSport SLA Model (R3.c) for enabling the billing, and the service-level agreements of the Cloud PaaS offerings registered at the proposed marketplace infrastructure;
R4. the PaaSport Unified PaaS API that is a common API (conformant to standards and existing work) exploited in order to uniformly interact with the heterogeneous PaaS offerings, thus facilitating the deployment, migration and management of business applications independent of the underlying PaaS offering;
R5. the PaaSport Marketplace Demonstrators that will validate and prove the architecture, models and layers of the proposed PaaSport Marketplace infrastructure against technical and business scenarios;
R6. the PaaSport Lessons Learnt and Adoption Guidelines, which constitutes a methodological cookbook for the efficient organization and operation of Cloud PaaS offerings marketplaces;
R7. Wide-scale dissemination and exploitation of the project results to the European software SMEs and the European SME associations.
During this period (month 16 to month 36), all the milestones of the project (as depicted from the table below) have been achieved. Specifically, with the completion of the PaaSport project, the developed PaaSport Platform features a Technical Readiness Level of 7 (TRL 7) based on the technology maturity assessment table provided by the EU H2020 Work Programme . This means that the developed PaaSport Platform has been demonstrated in both relevant and operational environments with the system prototype available online and accessible from the PaaSport website (http://demo.paasport-project.eu/).
In addition to this, the PaaSport Platform adheres to the DIN-SPEC standardization efforts for unified and portable cloud application management (DIN SPEC 91337). Specifically, the DIN (Deutsches Institut für Normung) is the German Institute for Standardization. DIN and PaaSport consortium have been working together for the past few months to develop, deliver, and make available to the market a specification for Application Management Interface for Cloud Platforms. This is the first IT innovation to be standardized and published by DIN at the international level. The standard and publishable materials will be provided in 2017 in English targeting international users. The package comes in two parts: 1. Normative and 2. Informative. The Normative part is a written document of 24-30 pages (subject to the final format by DIN) and the Informative part is the downloadable zip file including standardized APIs. The "DIN SPEC 91337 - Unified Application Management Interface for Cloud Application Platforms" is expected to be released in 2017.
Project Results:
PaaSport Marketplace is a platform that resolves the data and application portability issues that exist in the Cloud PaaS market through a flexible and efficient deployment and migration approach, for the benefit of cloud application developers and PaaS providers. This single, interoperable marketplace removes the semantic interoperability barriers and enables the unified access to different PaaS offerings, facilitates cross-platform deployment and allows Cloud PaaS vendors to benefit.
PaaSport Marketplace allows developers to be independent from a single vendor and be able to switch between different platforms that they can discover through a single marketplace. By using the PaaS paradigm, developers can enhance their development and deployment process, while developers using PaaSport can be helped to save time and reduce the cost of deployment and migrating from one provider to the other. Developers also benefit by the requirement elicitation through the definition of application requirements that are used in order to find the recommended PaaS offerings.
For developers, the added value offered by PaaSport is provided by the following:
Easy to use portability and monitoring libraries to develop and monitor portable PaaS services (e.g. web services, databases)
A marketplace to search for suitable PaaS offerings across industry leading and EU-based cloud providers based on the application, resource and offering requirements.
The marketplace hosts offerings for the following 8 cloud providers: Openshift, Heroku, CloudFoundry, IBM BlueMix, AWS Beanstalk, Apache Stratos, Stackato and CloudControl
Ranked results of PaaS offerings that match user requirements which allow users to easily select the offerings that satisfy best their needs
Real-time, scalable and elastic application monitoring and SLA violation notification service
PaaS providers, and especially the start-ups and SMEs, can also benefit from using PaaSport Marketplace as they are offered with a marketplace that they can join and add their product in order attract more customers to their platform. PaaS providers can use the extended model of PaaSport in order to define all characteristics of their PaaS offering; from infrastructural parameters to defining all the services that are supported by each PaaS. Overall, PaaSport Marketplace can help European Cloud PaaS vendors to increase their competitiveness by providing feedback for improving their offerings and promoting interoperability and standards in the PaaS segment.
Demonstration of the platform usage is also available on the videos of the platform that are available on the project YouTube channel . The integrated PaaSport marketplace is publicly available at http://demo.paasport-project.eu.
The welcome, login and registration pages provide to the interested user information about PaaSport marketplace and also about the project, and include the links for the login and registration forms.
In the next paragraphs, the main S&T results and foregrounds are presented.
PaaSport Requirements Analysis
A review of the state-of-the-art and the market shareholder expectations related to Cloud Computing interoperability was conducted. This report was focused on the needs from members of the participating Software SMEs Associations, providing a prioritized list of requirements that will be addressed by PaaSport. An online survey was conducted in which 146 Cloud-related companies participated where their target groups are mainly SMEs and business customers. The participating companies come from Germany, Turkey, Sweden, Italy, Greece, Latvia, Belgium, Australia and Cyprus. Based on these findings, the PaaSport Reference Architecture has been designed. The findings of this analysis are presented in D1.1.
PaaSport Reference Architecture
The PaaSport Reference Architecture addresses the requirements that have been included in the prioritised list and constitutes the blueprint of the PaaSport Marketplace Infrastructure. PaaSport Marketplace constitutes a thin, non-intrusive broker that mediates between PaaS offerings and PaaS users. It relies on open standards and introduces a scalable, reusable, modular, extendable and transferable approach for facilitating the deployment and execution of resource intensive business services on top of semantically-enhanced Cloud PaaS offerings. PaaSport Reference architecture was consolidated in PaaSport D1.2 and it is illustrated in Figure .
PaaSport Marketplace comprises of the following five layers:
The PaaSport Semantic Models that serve as the conceptual and modelling pillars of the marketplace infrastructure, for the annotation of the registered PaaS offerings and the deployed applications profiles;
The PaaS Offering Recommendation Layer that implements the core functionalities offered by the PaaSport Marketplace Infrastructure, such as PaaS offering discovery, recommendation and rating;
The Monitoring and SLA Enforcement Layer that realizes the monitoring of the deployed business applications and the corresponding Service Level agreement;
The Persistency, Execution and Coordination Layer that puts in place the technical infrastructure, e.g. repositories, on top of which the PaaSport marketplace is built. It also includes the PaaSport Unified PaaS API that is a common API exploited in order to uniformly interact with the heterogeneous PaaS offerings and, in addition, it realizes the lifecycle management of the deployed applications.
The Adaptive Front-ends that support seamless interaction between the users and the PaaSport functionalities, through a set of configurable utilities that are adapted to the user’s context;
PaaSport Semantic Models
PaaSport Semantic models provide the necessary concepts and attributes for the definition of the semantic profiles of the available Cloud PaaS offerings, the applications to be deployed through the proposed Cloud marketplace and the SLAs to be established between the offerings’ providers and the applications owners. In particular, the following semantic models have been developed:
the PaaSport Platform as a Service model that facilitates the semantic description of the available Cloud PaaS offerings in terms of functionalities, resources and business characteristics offered;
the PaaSport Application model that enables the semantic description of the application to be deployed on a PaaS offering through the PaaSport marketplace, in terms of functionalities, resource and business characteristics requirements; and
the PaaSport SLA Model that enables the structured descriptions of the service-level agreements provided and supported by the registered PaaS offerings.
PaaS Offering Recommendation Layer
In PaaSport, the PaaS Offering Recommendation Layer (described in D2.2 and D2.3) is responsible of filtering and recommending the best suitable PaaS Offerings. Based on the PaaSport Cloud-broker Architecture specification, PaaS Offering Recommendation Layer includes eight main sub-components. The sub-components are as follows:
PaaS Offering Search
Semantic Query Handling,
Semantic PaaS Offering Discovery
Application to PaaS Offering Matchmaking
PaaS Offering Shortlist
PaaS Offering Selection
SLA Matchmaking
PaaS Offering Rating
In order for the user to obtain the desired results, the PaaS offering recommendation layer interacts with PaaSport semantic models discussed and with the Persistence, Execution and Coordination Layer via the search and discovery interfaces.
PaaSport Recommendation Algorithm and Model
The Recommendation Layer of the PaaSport Reference Architecture involves the development of algorithms and software for supporting the selection of the most appropriate PaaS offering that best matches the requirements of the application a developer wants to deploy. Under this context, the PaaSport recommendation algorithms and models are aimed at providing the necessary semantic layer on top of the offering and application model descriptions, solving interoperability issues and improving the quality of the recommendations. To this end, standard vocabularies and ontology languages are used for capturing the structural and semantic characteristics of the various entities involved in the PaaSport domain, whereas the underlying conceptual models facilitate the use of lightweight reasoning during the matchmaking process.
A semantic matchmaking algorithm (described in D2.1) has been developed in the context of PaaSport to support the selection and scoring of persistently stores PaaS offerings with respect to cloud application models provided as input. The algorithm consists of two parts:
the matchmaking part, where the functional parameters of the application profile are taken into account to rule out inconsistent offerings, and
the ranking part, where the non-functional parameters of the application profile are taken into account to score offerings and rank them according to this score.
A proof-of-concept SPARQL-based implementation of the algorithm and the Java API that can be used to integrate the framework in existing architectures were developed. Considering the algorithm-specific requirements, we have met the following requirements:
The matchmaking and recommendation algorithm is efficient and scalable, since its complexity is linear to the number of instances and the number of parameters.
The matchmaking and recommendation algorithm is easily extensible. Actually, when the semantic model is extended with new offering instances, concepts and parameters, the algorithm does not change at all, because the algorithm is agnostic to domain specific concepts and parameters.
A novel SLA policy model (described in D3.1) has been introduced which is utilized for agreement between a PaaS offering and a service consumer who intends to deploy his/her application. The main contributions of this model can be summarized as follows:
• The Paasport metrics meta-model presented is PaaS provider agnostic and compatible to PaaSport semantic models.
• The PaaSport SLA management model considers the available metrics from both the application level and the PaaS providers API.
• PaaSport broker leverage the presented SLA policy model, which extends the WS-Agreement schema, in order to monitor not only the SLA between the PaaS provider and the service consumer but also the service consumer custom requirements.
Monitoring and SLA Enforcement Layer
This Layer (described in D3.2 and D3.3) which is responsible to monitor the deployed business applications and the corresponding Service Level agreement, includes the following core components:
PaaS Offering Management component: It provides the functionalities to manage both the semantic profiles of PaaS offering models and PaaS offerings, and enables the filtering of PaaS offerings based on custom filters. It is a mechanism for easy and transparent access to PaaSport repositories. Furthermore, PaaSport approach allows the reuse of PaaS offering models by various PaaS providers for the creation of multiple, interoperable, PaaS offerings.
Application Lifecycle Management (ALM) component: This mechanism enables the creation, deployment, undeployment, deletion and search of applications. We implicitly define the Application Lifecycle which resides in the core of the PaaSport system. The PaaSport ALM component guarantees that applications strictly follow the defined application lifecycle and they are always in a consistent state.
PaaSport Monitoring System: It comprises an automated and portable monitoring stack capable of supporting interoperable collection of PaaS application metrics, so as to provide end-users' with portable Monitoring-as-a-Service.
SLA Violation Detection and Alerting Service: On top of the PaaSport monitoring system we design and implement the PaaSport SLA Violation Detection and Alerting Componentwhich is an easily extendable system responsible for real-time detection of SLA violations and alerting.
All the functionalities of the developed components are easily accessible though well-defined REST APIs, and are utilized by PaaSport components or external services.
Persistency, Execution and Coordination Layer
Persistence layer (described in D4.2 and D4.3) responsibility is to conceptualize the repositories and the interfaces needed by mechanisms that are part of PaaSport marketplace on all PaaSport Layers. The components responsible for persistence are the specific repositories that store the semantic descriptions of the advertised PaaS offerings, the deployed application, and the users of the PaaSport Marketplace. Apart from the dedicated repositories, the persistence layer includes appropriate interfaces for creation and management of data entities. These interfaces are available to be used by other PaaSport layers that need access to the repositories and are called Search and Discovery Interfaces.
Execution layer (described in D4.2 and D4.3) is responsible for the cross-platform deployment and management of application. This layer includes components utilizing specific functionalities, namely the PaaSport Unified Cloud API, a set of corresponding PaaSport Adapters, the interoperability/portability libraries (hereinafter PaaSport SPI approach), and the Tunnelling and Virtual Execution Component.
A PaaSport Unified PaaS API (described in D4.1) has been implemented. Specifically, this API allows the deployment, management and migration of applications transparently to the user and independent of the specificities of a PaaS offering, by building upon and extending CAMP and the Cloud4SOA APIs. The PaaSport Dynamic Configuration Interface that boosts the portability of applications deployed to the cloud has also been defined. This model is used as the base for the PaaSport Unified Cloud API, a REST API that attempts to provide interoperability by encapsulating common functionalities offered by the PaaS offerings API. Also, the PaaSport Dynamic Configuration Interface (PaaSport SPI) is defined along with the approach that allows the portability of applications.
The PaaSport Unified Cloud API has been implemented based on the analysis of PaaS providers’ APIs and the elaboration of third-party initiatives related to PaaS interaction. This API relies on some commonly identified entities related to PaaS offerings and on the support of CRUD methods (Create Retrieve Update Delete) for these entities. PaaSport Adapters rely on the interface of PaaSport Unified Cloud API in order to support the unified interaction between PaaSport and PaaS platforms. Tunnelling and virtual execution component uses PaaSport Unified Cloud API methods in order to encapsulate proper deployment and management through PaaSport, as deployment and management methods differ among PaaS offerings. A Message-oriented middleware (MOM) has also been used in order to allow the asynchronous operation of calls to PaaS offerings that are time consuming. In addition to this interaction, Interoperability/Portability Libraries have been developed as part of the execution layer. These libraries should be used when developing the application that will be deployed to PaaS offerings supported by PaaSport.
Coordination layer (described in D5.1) includes services that are provided to other components of the overall architecture, including the REST interface utilized by the User Interface (UI) and provides an additional and clear conceptual delineation between persistence and execution functions The coordination components provide mechanisms for orchestrating applications’ lifecycle management and PaaS offerings management. Through lifecycle management, we refer to the ability of managing the state of a PaaS offering or an application throughout their lifespan, while PaaS offering management refers to the management semantic profiles of the PaaS offerings. The functionalities offered are implemented in the orchestration component that consists of three subcomponents, the Application Lifecycle Management (ALM), the PaaS Offering Management and the UI Landing Point.
Adaptive Front-ends
The PaaS Offering provider as well as the software engineers accesses the PaaSport broker and marketplace using the User Interface (UI). The UI can be considered as the promotion of the marketplace. The UI constitutes the topmost layer of the reference architecture and supports the access of the users to the marketplace functionalities. According to the particular preferences of different kind of users, e.g. DevOps engineers or PaaS providers, the UI provides configurable components adapted to the user’s profile and context.
Non-technical, the UI (described in D5.2) has been designed to be user-friendly, pleasant and functional. The usability is increased for the end-user by providing an UI usable on different devices as on conventional computers, laptops or tablets. From a technical point of view, there exist the following requirements. Having the performance in mind, the resulting user interface needs to be designed in order to need as less server load as possible. To ensure compatibility the data supply of the UI should agree with the one provided by the server.
The UI consists of three parts. The first one, the common front-end components, describes the common front-end viewable of service developers as well as of PaaS providers. It provides a catalogue component as well as the user management widget.
Cloud Market Place Catalogue component: Search and Discovery interfaces provided by the Persistency, Execution and Coordination Layer
User Management Widget: User profiles databases provided by the Persistency, Execution and Coordination Layer
The next two parts are dedicated to the different user groups in the marketplace. A Software SMEs needs access to other services as the PaaS providers. The adaptive front-end is offering a personalized space for each of them.
Application Semantic Profile Management Widget for DevOps Engineer: Search and Discovery interfaces provided by the Persistency, Execution, and Coordination layer, application models
Application Monitoring Widget: Deployed application monitoring component and SLA Monitoring component provided by the Monitoring and SLA enforcement layer
Search PaaS Offerings Widget: Interaction with the PaaS offering shortlisting, PaaS offering search and PaaS offering selection provided by the PaaS Offering recommendation layer
PaaS Rating Widget: Offers a user interface for the rating of PaaS providers
Application Migration Widget: tunnelling, virtual execution and application lifecycle management component provided by the Persistency, Execution, and Coordination Layer
SLA Matchmaking Widget: displays the SLA terms and matchmaking terms with the help of the SLA enforcement component provided by Monitoring Layer as well as the SLA matchmaking component provided by the PaaS offering recommendation layer and the application profiles repository supplied by the Persistency, Execution and Coordination layer
Application Lifecycle Management Widget: A front-end for the application life-cycle management component provided by the Persistency, Execution, and Coordination layer
Account Information Widget: Provides consolidated charges to the DevOps Engineer, account information can be added and edited by interacting with the PaaSport Unified PaaS API from the Persistency, Execution, and Coordination layer.
PaaS Offerings Management Widget: Deliver a list of PaaS offerings as well as forms to manage PaaS offerings including the PaaS provider information stemming from PaaS offerings and profiles repository out of the Persistency, Execution, and Coordination layer and from the offering search out of the PaaS offering recommendation layer.
PaaS Offering Semantic Profile Widget: Creates list of PaaS offerings descriptions and form to create and edit PaaS offerings descriptions with the help of PaaS offerings profiles repository included in the Persistency, Execution and Coordination layer as well as with the help of the PaaS model stemming from the semantic models layer.
The PaaSport marketplace UI is a client application in a web browser.
Integration & Testing
The integration (described in D5.3) is based on the Spring framework according to the power of this framework itself and the high number of extensions available. Furthermore, the open project structure gives the recommended possibility to extend the Spring framework in order to fit perfect into the PaaSport framework. The project is organized with the help of Apache Software project Maven in combination with Jenkins to handle the build system and SonarQube for quality assurance. Software and documents are shared in a common way using the open source tool Git as well as Nexus. Continuous integration during the developing process is ensured with the help of the Jenkins framework.
The testing plan includes unit tests as well as integration tests. The unit testing belongs to every artefact developer and is performed before the integration of the artefact in the marketplace. For integration tests several main functionalities of the marketplace were identified with the help of the deliverable D1.2. The PaaSport marketplace includes bug tracking by distinguishing between user support by Bugzilla and internal issue tracked with the help of Git bug tracker.
A release plan for the PaaSport marketplace has also been prepared. It is orientated on the Git branching model and contains a first release and a final one. The particular artefacts are handled as separate features of full marketplace.
The PaaSport development is a continuous process which contains all required discrete steps that re-assure quality during the entire lifetime of the project. It could be argued that this process is realized in a virtual circle that contains the following functional components: a) Source-Code-Versioning/Management, b) Continuous Integration, c) Quality Assurance, d) Persistent Storage of built (a.k.a. artefacts) and e) Issue/Bug Tracking.
Each part of the circle is supported by mature tools that are setup and interoperate smoothly. More specifically these tools are: a) Git for Source Versioning, b) Jenkins for Continuous Integration, c) Sonar for quality assurance, d) nexus for artefact-management and e) OpenProject for Issue Tracking.
PaaSport Demonstrators
The first deployment of PaaSport Marketplace has been deployed by SingularLogic and is hosted in Ubitech premises. This deployment was used since the first release of PaaSport Marketplace was available and has been used as a demo server that allowed the project consortium to test and user the platform for evaluation, training, or even dissemination activities. This deployment also allowed Ubitech to utilize some internal PaaS offerings and execute the specified demonstration scenarios. The second deployment is the one managed CAS and is used for performing CAS demonstration scenarios and also it is used as a marketplace for BiTMI members. The third deployment is a testbed used by TBV and it has been used for testing the marketplace in terms of adaptation and extensibility, allowing the investigation of exploitation capabilities in the Turkish market. The PaaSport Demonstrators are described in D6.2.
PaaSport Platform Technological Readiness Level
With the completion of the PaaSport project, the developed PaaSport Platform features a Technical Readiness Level of 7 (TRL 7) based on the technology maturity assessment table provided by the EU H2020 Work Programme. This means that the developed PaaSport Platform has been demonstrated in both relevant and operational environments with the system prototype available online and accessible from the PaaSport website (http://demo.paasport-project.eu/). In addition to this, the PaaSport Platform adheres to the DIN-SPEC standardization efforts for unified and portable cloud application management (DIN SPEC 91337). Specifically, the DIN (Deutsches Institut für Normung) is the German Institute for Standardization. DIN and PaaSport consortium have been working together for the past few months to develop, deliver, and make available to the market a specification for Application Management Interface for Cloud Platforms. This is the first IT innovation to be standardized and published by DIN at the international level. The standard and publishable materials will be provided in 2017 in English targeting international users. The package comes in two parts: 1. Normative and 2. Informative. The Normative part is a written document of 24-30 pages (subject to the final format by DIN) and the Informative part is the downloadable zip file including standardized APIs. The "DIN SPEC 91337 - Unified Application Management Interface for Cloud Application Platforms" is expected to be released in 2017.
Conclusion
The PaaSport Platform is currently in its second release (v0.2-beta) with SME association members and other invitees able to request access, test the platform free-of-charge and provide critical feedback to the consortium. Feedback from early adopters allows the consortium to assess and confirm the platform’s overall quality and performance. Feedback is collected via direct interactions (e.g. after demonstrations), the PaaSport support email channel (support@paasport-project.eu) and the PaaSport issue tracking service (https://github.com/ubitech/paasport/issues) for bug reporting and feature requests.
Potential Impact:
In the PaaSport context, the dissemination of the achieved results, the transfer of knowledge and technology, the creation of awareness about the solutions and their applications, the involvement of the stakeholders, and the sharing of the technological solutions are key factors and represent an integral part of the work of the project.
The dissemination activities have been elaborated to guarantee that the following objectives would be achieved:
Attract the industrial and research communities by promoting the capacities and benefits of the developed PaaSport results;
Keep strong involvement of the related communities by allowing closer collaboration among different groups and organizations;
Transfer and ensure reuse of knowledge and innovation generated by PaaSport.
Deliverable leader was responsible for the overall monitoring of dissemination activities. However, all partners contributed to the dissemination of the project on national and international level. In order for NUI Galway to keep an overview of activities carried out, all partners reported their dissemination activities via the two online reporting forms (Section 4).
The main objective guiding the dissemination and clustering activities should be the provision of appropriate and reliable information to the interested parties about the project scope and expected results. Ensuring the proper awareness towards the project motivation and the rationale behind producing the specific results is a principal step, which offers insight on what PaaSport is all about, who would benefit from it and how.
Proper awareness means understanding. There is no point in making the addressed target groups aware of what the project is, if this is not comprehensive and oriented to their specific needs and interests. Thus, one main goal of the PaaSport dissemination and clustering activities was to instantiate and demonstrate the related products to different levels, aiming at the higher penetration and ultimately, exploitation of the underlying concepts and technologies to these groups.
. PaaSport expects to have several target groups interested in PaaS offerings, Cloud, Brokerage and SME’s Marketplace domains. Hence, dissemination efforts carried out over the project’s lifetime aims at the following groups of people:
2.2.1. Industrial group
The main target of our dissemination activities are industrial players: cloud providers, members of the SMEs Associations in the four SMEs Association countries, and companies and/or SMEs that are developing and deploying business applications. It is of critical importance to bringing these players in to explore project results. In order to do so, their technical needs and requirements as well as their demands for confidentiality have been met.
Academic group
The academic and research community form the second target group. The involvement of the academic and research community is encouraged through the collaboration between PaaSport partners and researchers, in the form of academic publications and communication in conferences and academic events.
European projects
During the first and second years, PaaSport established collaborations with other European projects such as STRATEGIC, CloudTeams, PaaSword, Clouding SMEs, EuroCloud Germany, and European Digital SME Alliance.
Other groups
Governments, policy makers, and public sectors are equally targeted by the actions of PaaSport as they may be interested in PaaSport results and its economical and social impacts in the different communities. They may also be interested in knowing how the innovation will be used in different sector in order to develop supporting policy and regulations both at the national and regional levels and provide services to companies or SMEs.
Dissemination is seemed to be effective when multiple tools and communication channels are considered. In order to spread the word about the project as well as its outcomes, tools and communication channels were used to facilitate dissemination activities.
Each partner was in charge of locally monitoring its own dissemination activities and regularly reporting the performed activities via the online reporting forms. All partners were responsible for liaising with the local and regional media for dissemination purposes.
In addition, activities were measured by the responsible members on a monthly basis and measurement result was reported to the dissemination manager in order to analyse what works and what doesn’t. The measurement was the input for refining the activities to get a better result. Below, metrics of major and measurable activities is presented. As can be seen in the table below, we have exceeded the measurable goals in most of the activities.
DISSEMINATION ACTIVITIES
In this section, all dissemination activities completed by partners are presented.
Promotional Materials
Project Logo
Project Brochure
Project Graphic
Project Posters
Project Stickers
Project T Shirt
PaaSport website
Email Signature and Newsletter
PaaSport media accounts
The core of the marketplace is STRATEGIC orchestration services help public bodies to manage the entire lifecycle of an application in public, private or hybrid infrastructure.
As STRATEGIC is focusing on Cloud, there was an interest on following Standards, as standards are very important for public sector. Based on this, there was a synergy between STRATEGIC and PaaSport for DIN SPEC 91337. STRATEGIC project contributed to the standard through providing feedback to the pre-final versions of DIN SPEC 91337 standard and its documents. Also there is interest of STRATEGIC to be one of the first platforms that will comply with the standard, by investigating the creation of a DIN SPEC 91337 compliant interface that will allow the easy integration of DIN SPEC 91337 compliant PaaS providers to STRATEGIC platform.
CloudTeams Project (https://www.cloudteams.eu/)
PaaSword Project (https://www.paasword.eu/)
Clouding SMEs ( http://www.cloudingsmes.eu/)
EuroCloud Germany (http://www.eurocloud.de/)
European Digital SME Alliance(http://www.digitalsme.eu/)
AppHub – EU Commission’s Product
(https://directory.apphub.eu.com/).
The consortium organized four (4) demonstrations and training workshops in the participation software SMEs associations’ countries targeted the European SMEs. The aims of the four workshops were to present results of the project. During the workshops, proper dissemination took place to increase public/workshop participant’s awareness regarding the project’s achievements, results and added value.
A PaaSport Feedback questionnaire was developed by UCY, UBI, NUIG, and TBV to be distributed to the workshop participants. The aim of the questionnaire is to collect feedback from the workshop participants on the following four areas 1) Impact of the PaaSport, 2) PaaSPort model and recommendation mechanisms, 3) Deployment and management, and 4) Monitoring and SLA. Workshop organizers introduced the feedback questionnaire to the participants and invite them to answer to the questions during the workshop. After the workshop, a reminder email was sent to all participants. More details and results from the questionnaire will be available in Deliverable 7.5 – PaaSport Workshop and Training Activity Report. The PaaSport feedback questionnaire can be found at https://goo.gl/forms/YIV8qnwgPxJdxmWV2.
Conclusion
The purpose of this activity was to report the dissemination and clustering activities that were carried out as well as all means and material designed and produced for increasing the awareness of the project in the EU context but also for the wider public. Through the previous deliverable (Deliverable 7.2) we have identified dissemination objectives, strategies, and activities to be achieved during the lifetime of the project.
We have defined and completed various activities at both local and international levels. Both RTD performers and SME Associations have significantly contributed to achieving dissemination goals of the project. Considering the project outputs, PaaSPort generates both technical and business values. RTD performers are mainly responsible for technical aspects of the project while SME Associations are responsible for end-user’s and business aspects of the project. In this regard, RTD performer’s activities have spanned abroad range of activity areas such as scientific and technical publications, technical clustering with related projects, participating and presenting technical aspects of the project at related events and etc. While, SME Association’s activities have spanned abroad range of activity areas such as industry publication, PaaSport workshop and training for members of the associations, industry clustering, dissemination at the European Digital SME Alliance which is a well-known alliance in ICT industry, and participating at related events to disseminate PaaSport’s value to businesses and end-users.
Another significant achievement is the standardization of PaaSPort APIs with DIN – the German Institute for Standardization – and the PaaSport DIN SPEC case study. This significant step alone is a huge dissemination at the global level and puts PaaSport innovation at hand of many developers.
Finally, through dissemination activities, the consortium successfully achieved 1) wide dissemination of the results of the project, 2) transfer of knowledge and technology, 3) creation of awareness about the solutions and their applications, 4) the involvement of the stakeholders, and 5) the sharing of the technological solutions. In addition to the above achievements, the consortium 6) attracts the industrial and research communities by promoting the capacities and benefits of the developed PaaSport results, 7) keeps strong involvement of the related communities by allowing closer collaboration among different groups and organizations, and 8) transfer and ensure reuse of knowledge and innovation generated by PaaSport.
List of Websites:
http://paasport-project.eu/
The 36-month PaaSport project focused on resolving the data and application portability issues that exist in the Cloud PaaS market through a flexible and efficient deployment and migration approach. To this end, PaaSport specified and deliver a thin, non-intrusive Cloud-broker, to implement the enabling tools and technologies, and to deploy fully operational prototypes and large-scale demonstrators.
PaaSport enables European Cloud vendors (in particular SMEs) to roll out semantically interoperable PaaS offerings leveraging their competitive advantage, the quality of service and value delivered to their customers, and improving their outreach to potential customers, particularly the pan-European software industry. PaaSport also enables European Software SMEs to deploy business applications on the best-matching Cloud PaaS and to seamlessly migrate these applications on demand. PaaSport contributes to aligning and interconnecting heterogeneous PaaS offerings, overcoming the vendor lock-in problem and lowering switching costs.
Project Context and Objectives:
The 36-month PaaSport project focuses on resolving the application portability issues that exist in the Cloud PaaS market through a flexible and efficient deployment and migration approach. To this end, PaaSport is combining Cloud PaaS technologies with lightweight semantics in order to specify and deliver a thin, non-intrusive Cloud-broker (in the form of a Cloud PaaS Marketplace), to implement the enabling tools and technologies, and to deploy fully operational prototypes.
From developers’ perspective, the added value offered by PaaSport is provided by the following:
Easy to use portability and monitoring libraries to develop and monitor portable PaaS services
A marketplace to search for suitable PaaS offerings across industry leading and EU-based cloud providers based on the application, resource and offering requirements.
The marketplace hosts offerings for the following 8 cloud providers: Openshift, Heroku, CloudFoundry, IBM BlueMix, AWS Beanstalk, Apache Stratos, Stackato and CloudControl
Ranked results of PaaS offerings that match user requirements which allow users to easily select the offerings that satisfy best their needs
Real-time, scalable and elastic application monitoring and SLA violation notification service
From a business perspective, PaaSport aims at lifting the barriers that cause the vendor lock-in problem, thus empowering Cloud customers and Cloud application developers (in particular, European SME Software vendors) and allowing them to choose freely the Cloud PaaS offering that best fits their needs. Thus, PaaS providers, and especially the start-ups and SMEs, can also benefit from using PaaSport Marketplace as they are offered with a marketplace that they can join and add their product in order attract more customers to their platform. PaaS providers can use the extended model of PaaSport in order to define all characteristics of their PaaS offering; from infrastructural parameters to defining all the services that are supported by each PaaS. Overall, PaaSport Marketplace can help European Cloud PaaS vendors to increase their competitiveness by providing feedback for improving their offerings and promoting interoperability and standards in the PaaS segment.
PaaSport is also expected to empower the position and it is in line with the European Cloud Initiative that has been recently announced by European Commission and its goal is to strengthen Europe's position in data-driven innovation, improving competitiveness and cohesion, and helping to create a Digital Single Market in Europe. In order to maximize the communities awareness and adoption of the PaaSport results, the PaaSport partners (mainly the participating Software SME Associations) are following a European-wide dissemination strategy.
Led by the German ICT Federation BiTMI, the PaaSport consortium consists of twelve (12) partners, from seven (7) EU member states and associated countries, i.e. Germany, Sweden, Latvia, Turkey, Greece and Cyprus.
The results of PaaSport include (both reports and prototypes):
R1. the open PaaSport Cloud-broker Architecture, which will drive the creation of a semanticallyinteroperable PaaS offerings marketplace across the enlarged Europe, taking into consideration the business requirements of the European software SMEs;
R2. the innovative PaaSport Marketplace Infrastructure for semantically-interconnected Cloud PaaS offerings, facilitating the publication and advertisement of available Cloud PaaS offerings, the identification and recommendation of the best-matching PaaS offering, and the seamless business application deployment and migration. The PaaSport Marketplace comprises of three (3) core components (subsystems):
the PaaSport PaaS Offerings Recommendation Layer (R2.a) that facilitates the discovery, short-listing and recommendation of the most suitable and appropriate PaaS offering (registered at the PaaSport marketplace), based on the semantic profile of the application to be deployed;
the PaaSport Governance and Monitoring Layer (R2.b) that implements the core management functionalities offered by the PaaSport platform, such as the management of the registered PaaS offerings, as well as the monitoring and the lifecycle management of the deployed applications; and
the PaaSport Persistence and Execution Layer (R2.c) that puts in place the infrastructure that allows the registration of the PaaS offering at the PaaSport marketplace and the registration of the semantic profiles of the deployed applications.
Moreover, the PaaSport Marketplace Infrastructure integrates a set of configurable and adaptable (to the user’s context) front-ends that support seamless interaction of the users with the PaaSport functionalities;
R3. the PaaSport Modelling Artefacts and Semantic Models, which serve as the conceptual and modelling pillars of the proposed marketplace infrastructure, comprising of three (3) main models:
the PaaSport Platform as a Service model (R3.a) for enabling the semantic annotation of the available Cloud PaaS offerings in terms of functionalities, resources and business characteristics offered;
the PaaSport Application model (R3.b) for enabling the semantic annotation of the application to be deployed by users through the PaaSport marketplace, in terms of functionalities, resource and business characteristics requirements;
the PaaSport SLA Model (R3.c) for enabling the billing, and the service-level agreements of the Cloud PaaS offerings registered at the proposed marketplace infrastructure;
R4. the PaaSport Unified PaaS API that is a common API (conformant to standards and existing work) exploited in order to uniformly interact with the heterogeneous PaaS offerings, thus facilitating the deployment, migration and management of business applications independent of the underlying PaaS offering;
R5. the PaaSport Marketplace Demonstrators that will validate and prove the architecture, models and layers of the proposed PaaSport Marketplace infrastructure against technical and business scenarios;
R6. the PaaSport Lessons Learnt and Adoption Guidelines, which constitutes a methodological cookbook for the efficient organization and operation of Cloud PaaS offerings marketplaces;
R7. Wide-scale dissemination and exploitation of the project results to the European software SMEs and the European SME associations.
During this period (month 16 to month 36), all the milestones of the project (as depicted from the table below) have been achieved. Specifically, with the completion of the PaaSport project, the developed PaaSport Platform features a Technical Readiness Level of 7 (TRL 7) based on the technology maturity assessment table provided by the EU H2020 Work Programme . This means that the developed PaaSport Platform has been demonstrated in both relevant and operational environments with the system prototype available online and accessible from the PaaSport website (http://demo.paasport-project.eu/).
In addition to this, the PaaSport Platform adheres to the DIN-SPEC standardization efforts for unified and portable cloud application management (DIN SPEC 91337). Specifically, the DIN (Deutsches Institut für Normung) is the German Institute for Standardization. DIN and PaaSport consortium have been working together for the past few months to develop, deliver, and make available to the market a specification for Application Management Interface for Cloud Platforms. This is the first IT innovation to be standardized and published by DIN at the international level. The standard and publishable materials will be provided in 2017 in English targeting international users. The package comes in two parts: 1. Normative and 2. Informative. The Normative part is a written document of 24-30 pages (subject to the final format by DIN) and the Informative part is the downloadable zip file including standardized APIs. The "DIN SPEC 91337 - Unified Application Management Interface for Cloud Application Platforms" is expected to be released in 2017.
Project Results:
PaaSport Marketplace is a platform that resolves the data and application portability issues that exist in the Cloud PaaS market through a flexible and efficient deployment and migration approach, for the benefit of cloud application developers and PaaS providers. This single, interoperable marketplace removes the semantic interoperability barriers and enables the unified access to different PaaS offerings, facilitates cross-platform deployment and allows Cloud PaaS vendors to benefit.
PaaSport Marketplace allows developers to be independent from a single vendor and be able to switch between different platforms that they can discover through a single marketplace. By using the PaaS paradigm, developers can enhance their development and deployment process, while developers using PaaSport can be helped to save time and reduce the cost of deployment and migrating from one provider to the other. Developers also benefit by the requirement elicitation through the definition of application requirements that are used in order to find the recommended PaaS offerings.
For developers, the added value offered by PaaSport is provided by the following:
Easy to use portability and monitoring libraries to develop and monitor portable PaaS services (e.g. web services, databases)
A marketplace to search for suitable PaaS offerings across industry leading and EU-based cloud providers based on the application, resource and offering requirements.
The marketplace hosts offerings for the following 8 cloud providers: Openshift, Heroku, CloudFoundry, IBM BlueMix, AWS Beanstalk, Apache Stratos, Stackato and CloudControl
Ranked results of PaaS offerings that match user requirements which allow users to easily select the offerings that satisfy best their needs
Real-time, scalable and elastic application monitoring and SLA violation notification service
PaaS providers, and especially the start-ups and SMEs, can also benefit from using PaaSport Marketplace as they are offered with a marketplace that they can join and add their product in order attract more customers to their platform. PaaS providers can use the extended model of PaaSport in order to define all characteristics of their PaaS offering; from infrastructural parameters to defining all the services that are supported by each PaaS. Overall, PaaSport Marketplace can help European Cloud PaaS vendors to increase their competitiveness by providing feedback for improving their offerings and promoting interoperability and standards in the PaaS segment.
Demonstration of the platform usage is also available on the videos of the platform that are available on the project YouTube channel . The integrated PaaSport marketplace is publicly available at http://demo.paasport-project.eu.
The welcome, login and registration pages provide to the interested user information about PaaSport marketplace and also about the project, and include the links for the login and registration forms.
In the next paragraphs, the main S&T results and foregrounds are presented.
PaaSport Requirements Analysis
A review of the state-of-the-art and the market shareholder expectations related to Cloud Computing interoperability was conducted. This report was focused on the needs from members of the participating Software SMEs Associations, providing a prioritized list of requirements that will be addressed by PaaSport. An online survey was conducted in which 146 Cloud-related companies participated where their target groups are mainly SMEs and business customers. The participating companies come from Germany, Turkey, Sweden, Italy, Greece, Latvia, Belgium, Australia and Cyprus. Based on these findings, the PaaSport Reference Architecture has been designed. The findings of this analysis are presented in D1.1.
PaaSport Reference Architecture
The PaaSport Reference Architecture addresses the requirements that have been included in the prioritised list and constitutes the blueprint of the PaaSport Marketplace Infrastructure. PaaSport Marketplace constitutes a thin, non-intrusive broker that mediates between PaaS offerings and PaaS users. It relies on open standards and introduces a scalable, reusable, modular, extendable and transferable approach for facilitating the deployment and execution of resource intensive business services on top of semantically-enhanced Cloud PaaS offerings. PaaSport Reference architecture was consolidated in PaaSport D1.2 and it is illustrated in Figure .
PaaSport Marketplace comprises of the following five layers:
The PaaSport Semantic Models that serve as the conceptual and modelling pillars of the marketplace infrastructure, for the annotation of the registered PaaS offerings and the deployed applications profiles;
The PaaS Offering Recommendation Layer that implements the core functionalities offered by the PaaSport Marketplace Infrastructure, such as PaaS offering discovery, recommendation and rating;
The Monitoring and SLA Enforcement Layer that realizes the monitoring of the deployed business applications and the corresponding Service Level agreement;
The Persistency, Execution and Coordination Layer that puts in place the technical infrastructure, e.g. repositories, on top of which the PaaSport marketplace is built. It also includes the PaaSport Unified PaaS API that is a common API exploited in order to uniformly interact with the heterogeneous PaaS offerings and, in addition, it realizes the lifecycle management of the deployed applications.
The Adaptive Front-ends that support seamless interaction between the users and the PaaSport functionalities, through a set of configurable utilities that are adapted to the user’s context;
PaaSport Semantic Models
PaaSport Semantic models provide the necessary concepts and attributes for the definition of the semantic profiles of the available Cloud PaaS offerings, the applications to be deployed through the proposed Cloud marketplace and the SLAs to be established between the offerings’ providers and the applications owners. In particular, the following semantic models have been developed:
the PaaSport Platform as a Service model that facilitates the semantic description of the available Cloud PaaS offerings in terms of functionalities, resources and business characteristics offered;
the PaaSport Application model that enables the semantic description of the application to be deployed on a PaaS offering through the PaaSport marketplace, in terms of functionalities, resource and business characteristics requirements; and
the PaaSport SLA Model that enables the structured descriptions of the service-level agreements provided and supported by the registered PaaS offerings.
PaaS Offering Recommendation Layer
In PaaSport, the PaaS Offering Recommendation Layer (described in D2.2 and D2.3) is responsible of filtering and recommending the best suitable PaaS Offerings. Based on the PaaSport Cloud-broker Architecture specification, PaaS Offering Recommendation Layer includes eight main sub-components. The sub-components are as follows:
PaaS Offering Search
Semantic Query Handling,
Semantic PaaS Offering Discovery
Application to PaaS Offering Matchmaking
PaaS Offering Shortlist
PaaS Offering Selection
SLA Matchmaking
PaaS Offering Rating
In order for the user to obtain the desired results, the PaaS offering recommendation layer interacts with PaaSport semantic models discussed and with the Persistence, Execution and Coordination Layer via the search and discovery interfaces.
PaaSport Recommendation Algorithm and Model
The Recommendation Layer of the PaaSport Reference Architecture involves the development of algorithms and software for supporting the selection of the most appropriate PaaS offering that best matches the requirements of the application a developer wants to deploy. Under this context, the PaaSport recommendation algorithms and models are aimed at providing the necessary semantic layer on top of the offering and application model descriptions, solving interoperability issues and improving the quality of the recommendations. To this end, standard vocabularies and ontology languages are used for capturing the structural and semantic characteristics of the various entities involved in the PaaSport domain, whereas the underlying conceptual models facilitate the use of lightweight reasoning during the matchmaking process.
A semantic matchmaking algorithm (described in D2.1) has been developed in the context of PaaSport to support the selection and scoring of persistently stores PaaS offerings with respect to cloud application models provided as input. The algorithm consists of two parts:
the matchmaking part, where the functional parameters of the application profile are taken into account to rule out inconsistent offerings, and
the ranking part, where the non-functional parameters of the application profile are taken into account to score offerings and rank them according to this score.
A proof-of-concept SPARQL-based implementation of the algorithm and the Java API that can be used to integrate the framework in existing architectures were developed. Considering the algorithm-specific requirements, we have met the following requirements:
The matchmaking and recommendation algorithm is efficient and scalable, since its complexity is linear to the number of instances and the number of parameters.
The matchmaking and recommendation algorithm is easily extensible. Actually, when the semantic model is extended with new offering instances, concepts and parameters, the algorithm does not change at all, because the algorithm is agnostic to domain specific concepts and parameters.
A novel SLA policy model (described in D3.1) has been introduced which is utilized for agreement between a PaaS offering and a service consumer who intends to deploy his/her application. The main contributions of this model can be summarized as follows:
• The Paasport metrics meta-model presented is PaaS provider agnostic and compatible to PaaSport semantic models.
• The PaaSport SLA management model considers the available metrics from both the application level and the PaaS providers API.
• PaaSport broker leverage the presented SLA policy model, which extends the WS-Agreement schema, in order to monitor not only the SLA between the PaaS provider and the service consumer but also the service consumer custom requirements.
Monitoring and SLA Enforcement Layer
This Layer (described in D3.2 and D3.3) which is responsible to monitor the deployed business applications and the corresponding Service Level agreement, includes the following core components:
PaaS Offering Management component: It provides the functionalities to manage both the semantic profiles of PaaS offering models and PaaS offerings, and enables the filtering of PaaS offerings based on custom filters. It is a mechanism for easy and transparent access to PaaSport repositories. Furthermore, PaaSport approach allows the reuse of PaaS offering models by various PaaS providers for the creation of multiple, interoperable, PaaS offerings.
Application Lifecycle Management (ALM) component: This mechanism enables the creation, deployment, undeployment, deletion and search of applications. We implicitly define the Application Lifecycle which resides in the core of the PaaSport system. The PaaSport ALM component guarantees that applications strictly follow the defined application lifecycle and they are always in a consistent state.
PaaSport Monitoring System: It comprises an automated and portable monitoring stack capable of supporting interoperable collection of PaaS application metrics, so as to provide end-users' with portable Monitoring-as-a-Service.
SLA Violation Detection and Alerting Service: On top of the PaaSport monitoring system we design and implement the PaaSport SLA Violation Detection and Alerting Componentwhich is an easily extendable system responsible for real-time detection of SLA violations and alerting.
All the functionalities of the developed components are easily accessible though well-defined REST APIs, and are utilized by PaaSport components or external services.
Persistency, Execution and Coordination Layer
Persistence layer (described in D4.2 and D4.3) responsibility is to conceptualize the repositories and the interfaces needed by mechanisms that are part of PaaSport marketplace on all PaaSport Layers. The components responsible for persistence are the specific repositories that store the semantic descriptions of the advertised PaaS offerings, the deployed application, and the users of the PaaSport Marketplace. Apart from the dedicated repositories, the persistence layer includes appropriate interfaces for creation and management of data entities. These interfaces are available to be used by other PaaSport layers that need access to the repositories and are called Search and Discovery Interfaces.
Execution layer (described in D4.2 and D4.3) is responsible for the cross-platform deployment and management of application. This layer includes components utilizing specific functionalities, namely the PaaSport Unified Cloud API, a set of corresponding PaaSport Adapters, the interoperability/portability libraries (hereinafter PaaSport SPI approach), and the Tunnelling and Virtual Execution Component.
A PaaSport Unified PaaS API (described in D4.1) has been implemented. Specifically, this API allows the deployment, management and migration of applications transparently to the user and independent of the specificities of a PaaS offering, by building upon and extending CAMP and the Cloud4SOA APIs. The PaaSport Dynamic Configuration Interface that boosts the portability of applications deployed to the cloud has also been defined. This model is used as the base for the PaaSport Unified Cloud API, a REST API that attempts to provide interoperability by encapsulating common functionalities offered by the PaaS offerings API. Also, the PaaSport Dynamic Configuration Interface (PaaSport SPI) is defined along with the approach that allows the portability of applications.
The PaaSport Unified Cloud API has been implemented based on the analysis of PaaS providers’ APIs and the elaboration of third-party initiatives related to PaaS interaction. This API relies on some commonly identified entities related to PaaS offerings and on the support of CRUD methods (Create Retrieve Update Delete) for these entities. PaaSport Adapters rely on the interface of PaaSport Unified Cloud API in order to support the unified interaction between PaaSport and PaaS platforms. Tunnelling and virtual execution component uses PaaSport Unified Cloud API methods in order to encapsulate proper deployment and management through PaaSport, as deployment and management methods differ among PaaS offerings. A Message-oriented middleware (MOM) has also been used in order to allow the asynchronous operation of calls to PaaS offerings that are time consuming. In addition to this interaction, Interoperability/Portability Libraries have been developed as part of the execution layer. These libraries should be used when developing the application that will be deployed to PaaS offerings supported by PaaSport.
Coordination layer (described in D5.1) includes services that are provided to other components of the overall architecture, including the REST interface utilized by the User Interface (UI) and provides an additional and clear conceptual delineation between persistence and execution functions The coordination components provide mechanisms for orchestrating applications’ lifecycle management and PaaS offerings management. Through lifecycle management, we refer to the ability of managing the state of a PaaS offering or an application throughout their lifespan, while PaaS offering management refers to the management semantic profiles of the PaaS offerings. The functionalities offered are implemented in the orchestration component that consists of three subcomponents, the Application Lifecycle Management (ALM), the PaaS Offering Management and the UI Landing Point.
Adaptive Front-ends
The PaaS Offering provider as well as the software engineers accesses the PaaSport broker and marketplace using the User Interface (UI). The UI can be considered as the promotion of the marketplace. The UI constitutes the topmost layer of the reference architecture and supports the access of the users to the marketplace functionalities. According to the particular preferences of different kind of users, e.g. DevOps engineers or PaaS providers, the UI provides configurable components adapted to the user’s profile and context.
Non-technical, the UI (described in D5.2) has been designed to be user-friendly, pleasant and functional. The usability is increased for the end-user by providing an UI usable on different devices as on conventional computers, laptops or tablets. From a technical point of view, there exist the following requirements. Having the performance in mind, the resulting user interface needs to be designed in order to need as less server load as possible. To ensure compatibility the data supply of the UI should agree with the one provided by the server.
The UI consists of three parts. The first one, the common front-end components, describes the common front-end viewable of service developers as well as of PaaS providers. It provides a catalogue component as well as the user management widget.
Cloud Market Place Catalogue component: Search and Discovery interfaces provided by the Persistency, Execution and Coordination Layer
User Management Widget: User profiles databases provided by the Persistency, Execution and Coordination Layer
The next two parts are dedicated to the different user groups in the marketplace. A Software SMEs needs access to other services as the PaaS providers. The adaptive front-end is offering a personalized space for each of them.
Application Semantic Profile Management Widget for DevOps Engineer: Search and Discovery interfaces provided by the Persistency, Execution, and Coordination layer, application models
Application Monitoring Widget: Deployed application monitoring component and SLA Monitoring component provided by the Monitoring and SLA enforcement layer
Search PaaS Offerings Widget: Interaction with the PaaS offering shortlisting, PaaS offering search and PaaS offering selection provided by the PaaS Offering recommendation layer
PaaS Rating Widget: Offers a user interface for the rating of PaaS providers
Application Migration Widget: tunnelling, virtual execution and application lifecycle management component provided by the Persistency, Execution, and Coordination Layer
SLA Matchmaking Widget: displays the SLA terms and matchmaking terms with the help of the SLA enforcement component provided by Monitoring Layer as well as the SLA matchmaking component provided by the PaaS offering recommendation layer and the application profiles repository supplied by the Persistency, Execution and Coordination layer
Application Lifecycle Management Widget: A front-end for the application life-cycle management component provided by the Persistency, Execution, and Coordination layer
Account Information Widget: Provides consolidated charges to the DevOps Engineer, account information can be added and edited by interacting with the PaaSport Unified PaaS API from the Persistency, Execution, and Coordination layer.
PaaS Offerings Management Widget: Deliver a list of PaaS offerings as well as forms to manage PaaS offerings including the PaaS provider information stemming from PaaS offerings and profiles repository out of the Persistency, Execution, and Coordination layer and from the offering search out of the PaaS offering recommendation layer.
PaaS Offering Semantic Profile Widget: Creates list of PaaS offerings descriptions and form to create and edit PaaS offerings descriptions with the help of PaaS offerings profiles repository included in the Persistency, Execution and Coordination layer as well as with the help of the PaaS model stemming from the semantic models layer.
The PaaSport marketplace UI is a client application in a web browser.
Integration & Testing
The integration (described in D5.3) is based on the Spring framework according to the power of this framework itself and the high number of extensions available. Furthermore, the open project structure gives the recommended possibility to extend the Spring framework in order to fit perfect into the PaaSport framework. The project is organized with the help of Apache Software project Maven in combination with Jenkins to handle the build system and SonarQube for quality assurance. Software and documents are shared in a common way using the open source tool Git as well as Nexus. Continuous integration during the developing process is ensured with the help of the Jenkins framework.
The testing plan includes unit tests as well as integration tests. The unit testing belongs to every artefact developer and is performed before the integration of the artefact in the marketplace. For integration tests several main functionalities of the marketplace were identified with the help of the deliverable D1.2. The PaaSport marketplace includes bug tracking by distinguishing between user support by Bugzilla and internal issue tracked with the help of Git bug tracker.
A release plan for the PaaSport marketplace has also been prepared. It is orientated on the Git branching model and contains a first release and a final one. The particular artefacts are handled as separate features of full marketplace.
The PaaSport development is a continuous process which contains all required discrete steps that re-assure quality during the entire lifetime of the project. It could be argued that this process is realized in a virtual circle that contains the following functional components: a) Source-Code-Versioning/Management, b) Continuous Integration, c) Quality Assurance, d) Persistent Storage of built (a.k.a. artefacts) and e) Issue/Bug Tracking.
Each part of the circle is supported by mature tools that are setup and interoperate smoothly. More specifically these tools are: a) Git for Source Versioning, b) Jenkins for Continuous Integration, c) Sonar for quality assurance, d) nexus for artefact-management and e) OpenProject for Issue Tracking.
PaaSport Demonstrators
The first deployment of PaaSport Marketplace has been deployed by SingularLogic and is hosted in Ubitech premises. This deployment was used since the first release of PaaSport Marketplace was available and has been used as a demo server that allowed the project consortium to test and user the platform for evaluation, training, or even dissemination activities. This deployment also allowed Ubitech to utilize some internal PaaS offerings and execute the specified demonstration scenarios. The second deployment is the one managed CAS and is used for performing CAS demonstration scenarios and also it is used as a marketplace for BiTMI members. The third deployment is a testbed used by TBV and it has been used for testing the marketplace in terms of adaptation and extensibility, allowing the investigation of exploitation capabilities in the Turkish market. The PaaSport Demonstrators are described in D6.2.
PaaSport Platform Technological Readiness Level
With the completion of the PaaSport project, the developed PaaSport Platform features a Technical Readiness Level of 7 (TRL 7) based on the technology maturity assessment table provided by the EU H2020 Work Programme. This means that the developed PaaSport Platform has been demonstrated in both relevant and operational environments with the system prototype available online and accessible from the PaaSport website (http://demo.paasport-project.eu/). In addition to this, the PaaSport Platform adheres to the DIN-SPEC standardization efforts for unified and portable cloud application management (DIN SPEC 91337). Specifically, the DIN (Deutsches Institut für Normung) is the German Institute for Standardization. DIN and PaaSport consortium have been working together for the past few months to develop, deliver, and make available to the market a specification for Application Management Interface for Cloud Platforms. This is the first IT innovation to be standardized and published by DIN at the international level. The standard and publishable materials will be provided in 2017 in English targeting international users. The package comes in two parts: 1. Normative and 2. Informative. The Normative part is a written document of 24-30 pages (subject to the final format by DIN) and the Informative part is the downloadable zip file including standardized APIs. The "DIN SPEC 91337 - Unified Application Management Interface for Cloud Application Platforms" is expected to be released in 2017.
Conclusion
The PaaSport Platform is currently in its second release (v0.2-beta) with SME association members and other invitees able to request access, test the platform free-of-charge and provide critical feedback to the consortium. Feedback from early adopters allows the consortium to assess and confirm the platform’s overall quality and performance. Feedback is collected via direct interactions (e.g. after demonstrations), the PaaSport support email channel (support@paasport-project.eu) and the PaaSport issue tracking service (https://github.com/ubitech/paasport/issues) for bug reporting and feature requests.
Potential Impact:
In the PaaSport context, the dissemination of the achieved results, the transfer of knowledge and technology, the creation of awareness about the solutions and their applications, the involvement of the stakeholders, and the sharing of the technological solutions are key factors and represent an integral part of the work of the project.
The dissemination activities have been elaborated to guarantee that the following objectives would be achieved:
Attract the industrial and research communities by promoting the capacities and benefits of the developed PaaSport results;
Keep strong involvement of the related communities by allowing closer collaboration among different groups and organizations;
Transfer and ensure reuse of knowledge and innovation generated by PaaSport.
Deliverable leader was responsible for the overall monitoring of dissemination activities. However, all partners contributed to the dissemination of the project on national and international level. In order for NUI Galway to keep an overview of activities carried out, all partners reported their dissemination activities via the two online reporting forms (Section 4).
The main objective guiding the dissemination and clustering activities should be the provision of appropriate and reliable information to the interested parties about the project scope and expected results. Ensuring the proper awareness towards the project motivation and the rationale behind producing the specific results is a principal step, which offers insight on what PaaSport is all about, who would benefit from it and how.
Proper awareness means understanding. There is no point in making the addressed target groups aware of what the project is, if this is not comprehensive and oriented to their specific needs and interests. Thus, one main goal of the PaaSport dissemination and clustering activities was to instantiate and demonstrate the related products to different levels, aiming at the higher penetration and ultimately, exploitation of the underlying concepts and technologies to these groups.
. PaaSport expects to have several target groups interested in PaaS offerings, Cloud, Brokerage and SME’s Marketplace domains. Hence, dissemination efforts carried out over the project’s lifetime aims at the following groups of people:
2.2.1. Industrial group
The main target of our dissemination activities are industrial players: cloud providers, members of the SMEs Associations in the four SMEs Association countries, and companies and/or SMEs that are developing and deploying business applications. It is of critical importance to bringing these players in to explore project results. In order to do so, their technical needs and requirements as well as their demands for confidentiality have been met.
Academic group
The academic and research community form the second target group. The involvement of the academic and research community is encouraged through the collaboration between PaaSport partners and researchers, in the form of academic publications and communication in conferences and academic events.
European projects
During the first and second years, PaaSport established collaborations with other European projects such as STRATEGIC, CloudTeams, PaaSword, Clouding SMEs, EuroCloud Germany, and European Digital SME Alliance.
Other groups
Governments, policy makers, and public sectors are equally targeted by the actions of PaaSport as they may be interested in PaaSport results and its economical and social impacts in the different communities. They may also be interested in knowing how the innovation will be used in different sector in order to develop supporting policy and regulations both at the national and regional levels and provide services to companies or SMEs.
Dissemination is seemed to be effective when multiple tools and communication channels are considered. In order to spread the word about the project as well as its outcomes, tools and communication channels were used to facilitate dissemination activities.
Each partner was in charge of locally monitoring its own dissemination activities and regularly reporting the performed activities via the online reporting forms. All partners were responsible for liaising with the local and regional media for dissemination purposes.
In addition, activities were measured by the responsible members on a monthly basis and measurement result was reported to the dissemination manager in order to analyse what works and what doesn’t. The measurement was the input for refining the activities to get a better result. Below, metrics of major and measurable activities is presented. As can be seen in the table below, we have exceeded the measurable goals in most of the activities.
DISSEMINATION ACTIVITIES
In this section, all dissemination activities completed by partners are presented.
Promotional Materials
Project Logo
Project Brochure
Project Graphic
Project Posters
Project Stickers
Project T Shirt
PaaSport website
Email Signature and Newsletter
PaaSport media accounts
The core of the marketplace is STRATEGIC orchestration services help public bodies to manage the entire lifecycle of an application in public, private or hybrid infrastructure.
As STRATEGIC is focusing on Cloud, there was an interest on following Standards, as standards are very important for public sector. Based on this, there was a synergy between STRATEGIC and PaaSport for DIN SPEC 91337. STRATEGIC project contributed to the standard through providing feedback to the pre-final versions of DIN SPEC 91337 standard and its documents. Also there is interest of STRATEGIC to be one of the first platforms that will comply with the standard, by investigating the creation of a DIN SPEC 91337 compliant interface that will allow the easy integration of DIN SPEC 91337 compliant PaaS providers to STRATEGIC platform.
CloudTeams Project (https://www.cloudteams.eu/)
PaaSword Project (https://www.paasword.eu/)
Clouding SMEs ( http://www.cloudingsmes.eu/)
EuroCloud Germany (http://www.eurocloud.de/)
European Digital SME Alliance(http://www.digitalsme.eu/)
AppHub – EU Commission’s Product
(https://directory.apphub.eu.com/).
The consortium organized four (4) demonstrations and training workshops in the participation software SMEs associations’ countries targeted the European SMEs. The aims of the four workshops were to present results of the project. During the workshops, proper dissemination took place to increase public/workshop participant’s awareness regarding the project’s achievements, results and added value.
A PaaSport Feedback questionnaire was developed by UCY, UBI, NUIG, and TBV to be distributed to the workshop participants. The aim of the questionnaire is to collect feedback from the workshop participants on the following four areas 1) Impact of the PaaSport, 2) PaaSPort model and recommendation mechanisms, 3) Deployment and management, and 4) Monitoring and SLA. Workshop organizers introduced the feedback questionnaire to the participants and invite them to answer to the questions during the workshop. After the workshop, a reminder email was sent to all participants. More details and results from the questionnaire will be available in Deliverable 7.5 – PaaSport Workshop and Training Activity Report. The PaaSport feedback questionnaire can be found at https://goo.gl/forms/YIV8qnwgPxJdxmWV2.
Conclusion
The purpose of this activity was to report the dissemination and clustering activities that were carried out as well as all means and material designed and produced for increasing the awareness of the project in the EU context but also for the wider public. Through the previous deliverable (Deliverable 7.2) we have identified dissemination objectives, strategies, and activities to be achieved during the lifetime of the project.
We have defined and completed various activities at both local and international levels. Both RTD performers and SME Associations have significantly contributed to achieving dissemination goals of the project. Considering the project outputs, PaaSPort generates both technical and business values. RTD performers are mainly responsible for technical aspects of the project while SME Associations are responsible for end-user’s and business aspects of the project. In this regard, RTD performer’s activities have spanned abroad range of activity areas such as scientific and technical publications, technical clustering with related projects, participating and presenting technical aspects of the project at related events and etc. While, SME Association’s activities have spanned abroad range of activity areas such as industry publication, PaaSport workshop and training for members of the associations, industry clustering, dissemination at the European Digital SME Alliance which is a well-known alliance in ICT industry, and participating at related events to disseminate PaaSport’s value to businesses and end-users.
Another significant achievement is the standardization of PaaSPort APIs with DIN – the German Institute for Standardization – and the PaaSport DIN SPEC case study. This significant step alone is a huge dissemination at the global level and puts PaaSport innovation at hand of many developers.
Finally, through dissemination activities, the consortium successfully achieved 1) wide dissemination of the results of the project, 2) transfer of knowledge and technology, 3) creation of awareness about the solutions and their applications, 4) the involvement of the stakeholders, and 5) the sharing of the technological solutions. In addition to the above achievements, the consortium 6) attracts the industrial and research communities by promoting the capacities and benefits of the developed PaaSport results, 7) keeps strong involvement of the related communities by allowing closer collaboration among different groups and organizations, and 8) transfer and ensure reuse of knowledge and innovation generated by PaaSport.
List of Websites:
http://paasport-project.eu/
