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Report

Teaser, summary, work performed and final results

Periodic Reporting for period 2 - BEACON (Enabling Federated Cloud Networking)

Teaser

Summary

Cloud federation enables cloud providers to collaborate and share their resources to create a large virtual pool of resources at multiple network locations. Different types of federation architectures for clouds and datacenters have been proposed and implemented (e.g. cloud bursting, cloud brokering or cloud aggregation) with different level of resource coupling and interoperation among the cloud resources, from loosely coupled, typically involving different administrative and legal domains, to tightly coupled federation, usually spanning multiple datacenters within an organization. In both situations, an effective, agile and secure federation of cloud networking resources is key to impact the deployment of federated applications.

There is a strong industry demand for automated solutions to federate cloud network resources, and to derive the integrated management cloud layer that enables an efficient and secure deployment of resources and services independent of their location across distributed infrastructures. From big companies and large cloud providers interested in unifying and consolidating multiple data centers or cloud sites to small and medium sized enterprises (SMEs) building hybrid cloud configurations, federated cloud networking is needed to support the automated deployment of applications across different clouds and data centers.

BEACON delivers a homogeneous virtualization layer, on top of heterogeneous underlying physical networks, computing and storage infrastructures, providing enablement for automated federation of applications across different clouds and datacenter.

The new inter-cloud network capabilities are leveraged by existing open source cloud platforms, OpenNebula and OpenStack, to deploy multi-cloud applications. In particular, different aspects of the platforms have been extended to accommodate the federated cloud networking features like multi-tenancy, federated orchestration of networking, compute and storage management or the placement and elasticity of the multi-cloud applications.

The objectives of the BEACON project are:
- to research and develop techniques to federate cloud network resources
- to derive the integrated management cloud layer that enables an efficient and secure deployment of federated cloud applications.
- to deliver a homogeneous virtualization layer, on top of heterogeneous underlying physical networks, computing and storage infrastructures, providing enablement for automated federation of applications across different clouds and datacenters.

The final result of the BEACON project is the BEACON framework and its open source implementation. The BEACON framework was used to add federated cloud networking functionality to the OpenStack and OpenNebula cloud platforms. The BEACON framework was validated in the BEACON testbeds with five use cases:
- Automated High Availability across Datacenters (UC1)
- Datacenter Location Aware Elasticity (UC2)
- Automated Service Function Chaining across Datacenters (UC3)
- Multi-cloud VM Security (UC4)
- Multi-cloud Deployment of an Airline Scheduling Application (UC5)

Work performed

The BEACON consortium agreed on software requirements for the various iterations of the project. Partners agree on how to refine the use cases and on how to integrate the federated networking architecture in OpenNebula and OpenStack. These use cases were refined and the set of requirements that needed to be implemented were split in different iterations. Each iteration focused on key features needed to demonstrate the potential of BEACON.

The BEACON project was structured into three design and development cycles:
- M4-M12: the first cycle started the design and implementation of the BEACON framework: key networking components were integrated into OpenNebula and OpenStack.
- M13-M21: the second cycle continued the design and implementation of the BEACON framework: use cases were validated in a hybrid cloud in the OpenNebula testbed and a broker cloud in the OpenStack testbed.
- M22-M27: the third cycle finalised the BEACON framework: interoperability of federated cloud networking was tested between the OpenNebula and OpenStack cloud platforms in the BEACON testbeds.

The main high priority requirements addressed during the first cycle were: Service placement policies across clouds, Transparent L2 network overlay across clouds, Extension of overlay networks across clouds, Open source vulnerability scanner, and Location-aware placement policies. A complete set of requirements is described in the BEACON framework deliverable.

At dissemination and exploitation level:
The website of BEACON (www.beacon-project.eu) was created and blog posts were published. These post presented the partners, the participation of the BEACON consortium to cloud related events and the proposed BEACON architecture in a few technical posts.
The BEACON partners participated to more than 10 conferences and workshops (OpenNebula Conf, CloudExpo Europe, CloudScape or VMWorld to name a few) a published various papers related to the cloud federation. The complete list of participation and papers is available in the Dissemination.
A market analysis on the potential of BEACON was performed and it is described in the Business Impact Report. This shows that BEACON is well positioned to have a major impact.
The Business Impact report has highlighted a strong economic potential for the BEACON framework thanks to the market analysis that was performed. Each partner has also described its business model canvas and its exploitation roadmap.

At Management level:
After the kick-off of the project held in Charleroi in February 2015, synchronization meetings were organized every four months. Weekly conference calls were also organized to keep the BEACON partners in synchronization with each other.

Final results

The first iteration of the project has focused on integrating the federated cloud networking architecture into OpenNebula and OpenStack. This enables these platforms to build federated cloud networks thanks to two basic components: the federation agent and the federated SDN. The federated SDN is reponsible for managing the federated networks and gathering the required data to link different network segments. The federation agent is responsible for creating data paths between the different cloud platforms of the federated network.

In the second iteration of the project the BEACON architecture has been tested in OpenNebula to OpenNebula/Amazon AWS federations, and OpenStack to OpenStack federations. Initial work on securing the federated cloud network has been started using a service manifest to describe the deployment of virtual network functions and their chaining within the federated cloud network.

The third iteration has focused on interoperability of federated cloud networking between OpenNenula and OpenStack cloud platforms.