During its lifetime, the SoftFIRE project has supported three “waves” of experimentations during which the platform has been extensively used by many organizations that developed services, applications or specific functions to extend its capabilities. The main objectives of second year of the project were:
- To improve and consolidate the Interworking features of the platform introducing new enhanced solutions and capabilities.
- To introduce new middleware and related programmable functions, especially in the realms of SDN and security;
- To execute a large set of experimentations to prove the merits of the federated testbed, consolidate it and evaluate it.
These goals have led the second-year activities towards these major results:
• functional extension and consolidation of a federated testbed able to support the needs of a large ecosystem of experimenters
• to create a middleware platform able to better support the needs of NFV/SDN users and to offer it to experimenters in the second, and third open call as well as to the Final Challenge
• preparation and execution of the second and third open call, the Final Challenge, and two Hackathons and several Open Days.
During year 2, SoftFIRE has improved the Federated Testbed that could better support third parties’ experiments over a renewed and richer federated infrastructure. This required improving the openVPN connectivity, and the existing individual testbeds. A great effort has been put on the introduction of security and SDN programmable functionalities offered to Experimenters as services. On top of this improved infrastructure, the project has developed, integrated, and tested a TOSCA based middleware layer usable for supporting the experimentation lifecycle by means of extended virtualization, programmability and security features. New tools to better control the development and testing as well as monitoring of the platform have been introduced.
Software focused also on the execution of the second, and third Open Calls. 25 experiments have been selected and executed in these Open Calls. In addition, up to 14 challengers have accessed the Federated Testbed for the Final Challenge. It was concluded in March 15th with 8 final participants. Two Hackathons have been successfully executed and other promotional/education activities have been performed (such as Open Days and tutorials/presentations of the platform). The SoftFIRE project has been able to further extend its community. The creation of the ecosystem has been possible thanks to a very extensive set of dissemination and exploitation actions that have had an international impact and exposure
