What is the problem/issue being addressed?
Virtualization is a key technology in Cloud computing that allows users to run multiple virtual machines (VM) with their own application environment on top of physical hardware. Essentially VMs are virtual slices of large, physical servers. Virtualization enables scaling up and down of applications by elastic on-demand provisioning of VMs in response to their variable load to achieve increased utilisation efficiency at a lower operational cost, while guaranteeing the desired level of Quality of Service (QoS, such as response time) to the end-users. Typically, VMs are created using provider-specific templates (so-called VM images) that are stored in proprietary repositories, leading to provider lock-in and hampering portability or simultaneous usage of multiple federated Clouds.
In this context, optimisation at the level of the VM images is needed both by the applications and by the underlying Cloud providers for improved resource usage, operational costs, elasticity, storage use, and other desired QoS- related features. We identify in this project five critical barriers that prevent many users from industry, business and academia to effectively use Cloud resources and virtualized environments for their computing and data processing needs: (i) manual, error-prone and time consuming VM image creation, (ii) monolithic VM images with large deployment and migration overheads, (iii) proprietary unoptimised VM repositories, (iv) inelastic resource provisioning, and (v) lack of information to support effective VM image optimisation.
Why is it important for society?
In European society, there are a large variety of industrial applications and users that can seriously benefit from the ENTICE environment, such as: Cloud providers, application developers and most importantly Cloud users.
Societal benefits of ENTICE will be the streamlined, automated and intuitive deployment process with simple, optimised, and predictable performance that helps to save time and effort to get customers cloud
ready. Hence, the ENTICE environment will provide substantial advantages to many potential costumers in the SaaS domain such as lower capital expenditures, no need to manage upgrades and patches, and enterprise scalability.
With the help of the lightweight ENTICE distributed VM repository, SaaS and IaaS-based applications and infrastructures will gain increased availability and elasticity. Thus, ENTICE and its technology brings unique Cloud advancements which go far beyond any other existing service or environment available in Europe and word-wide. At least one use case (DEIMOS EOD) will be deployed across the world with the help of ENTICE. For this to happen, ENTICE will be integrated with other non-European IaaS providers like FutureGrid and Amazon EC2.
ENTICE will ultimately be capable of receiving unmodified and functionally complete VM images from users, and transparently tailor and optimise them for specific Cloud infrastructures with respect to their size, configuration, and geographical distribution, such that they are loaded, delivered, and executed faster and with improved QoS compared to their current performances.
