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Report

Teaser, summary, work performed and final results

Periodic Reporting for period 1 - mF2C (Towards an Open, Secure, Decentralized and Coordinated Fog-to-Cloud Management Ecosystem)

Teaser

Summary

The increased usage of IoT devices, grouped in fogs, has highlighted the existent breach between traditional cloud computing services offering and current IoT needs. Cloud computing traditionally serves IoT customers supporting them on the storage and virtualization of their generated data and generating value for their businesses. However, the growth of IoT is affecting the way traditional cloud architectures work. The increased amount of data to be transferred can create potential bottlenecks driving non-negligible latency concerns. Furthermore, sending such a big amount of data to a cloud environment in very short periods of time can be inefficient and ineffective, apart from cumbersome and expensive. Both, fog and cloud, are concerned with compute, networking and storage; they share many of the mechanisms and attributes, such as virtualization and multitenancy. However, fog computing aims to address the latency issues detected in large IoT scenarios. This way, fog computing is not devised as a competitor to cloud; quite on the contrary, it is envisioned as the perfect ally for a broad spectrum of use cases and applications for which traditional cloud computing is not sufficient.

mF2C aims to close this gap providing a framework capable of managing resources and services in an optimal way. When put together, cloud and fog computing create a new stack of resources, referred to as Fog-to-Cloud (F2C), creating the need for a new, open, coordinated management ecosystem. To tackle those issues mF2C proposes an open, secure, decentralized, multi-stakeholder management framework, expected to set the foundations for a novel distributed system architecture.

Thus, the main goal is to design and develop a platform facilitating the efficient usage of resources, taking into consideration service requirements and user demands, in a paradigm shifting scenario combining cloud and fog computing. More in detail, mF2C can be decomposed in the following objectives:
- Manage a large, decentralized, heterogeneous, open, volatile, dynamic and non-trustable set of resources (from cloud to the edge of the network).
- Create new fog instances dynamically, facilitating their collaboration (resource sharing) with other fog instances, and associations with cloud computing systems through open interfaces and software compatibility.
- Offload computations, transparently and optimally to applications, between fog and cloud computing systems, reallocating both resources and services, as well as executing services in parallel.
- Enable efficient and cost-effective solutions, while expanding the scalability of businesses. Thus, developing new business models based on F2C solutions.
- Ensure interoperability by adopting standards and de-facto market standards.

Work performed

During this period the work has been concentrated on providing the initial version of the mF2C architecture while starting the design and development of the platform components. Main activities during these months have been concentrated on the design of a comprehensive architecture paving the way for a detailed functional definition and specification of the mF2C management systems and services, along with the dynamic and seamless connectivity and network services.

Baset on it, the Controller (hereafter Agent Controller, AC) block has been fully designed, including the interfaces needed for being integrated with the Gearbox (hereafter Platform Manager, PM) block. The design included aspects related to security to ensure a successful deployment. Core functionalities have started to be designed and represented as a set of workflows to show the conceptual view of the expected mF2C performance. On the other hand, the design of the Gearbox block has also already started, including its components and interfaces. It has to be noted that in the context of WP2, a decision was taken with regards to Gearbox and Controller naming, changing them to Platform Manager and Agent Controller respectively, and seeking to improve comprehensibility of the main architecture components.

IT-1 components have been fully developed and integrated, and will be enhanced in IT-2 during the next period. All the source code is licensing under open source schemes and public available in a GitHub repository.

From a non-technical perspective, the project has started identifying the most relevant standards that can be applied to its developments. A proposal to the OpenFog consortium has been made in order to enhance its reference architecture with project achivements. The project has been also very active in dissemination: set up and continuous update of the project website and social media accounts, papers publication, training days and workshops organization. At the same time, the project has started several exploitation activities focused in individual exploitation in order to reach sustainability at the end of the project.

Final results

mF2C has started the design of its first iteration of the management platform and framework, including a collaborative fog-to-cloud management model, promoting the evolution of the hybrid cloud concept to also include fog computing. All of this taking into account security considerations.

From a business perspective it is expected that the project opens the door to new business models that merge Cloud and IoT scenarios allowing different stakeholders to expand their business to new market niches, extending their portfolio and improving its competitive positioning in the European cloud market sector.