Report

Teaser, summary, work performed and final results

Periodic Reporting for period 1 - UNICORN (A NOVEL FRAMEWORK FOR MULTI-CLOUD SERVICES DEVELOPMENT, ORCHESTRATION, DEPLOYMENT AND CONTINUOUS MANAGEMENT FOSTERING CLOUD TECHNOLOGIES UPTAKE FROM DIGITAL SMES AND STARTUPS)

Teaser

UNICORN project focuses on delivering a unified platform that will facilitate SMEs and Startups to develop, deploy and manage secure-by-design and elastic-by-design cloud applications and services, that follow the micro-service architectural paradigm, on multi-cloud...

Summary

UNICORN project focuses on delivering a unified platform that will facilitate SMEs and Startups to develop, deploy and manage secure-by-design and elastic-by-design cloud applications and services, that follow the micro-service architectural paradigm, on multi-cloud programmable execution environments. By adopting microservices, SMEs and Startups manage to lower innovation barriers and gain significant benefits. However, as our Stakeholders and Requirement Analysis study has shown (see Deliverable D1.1), there are still a number of challenges that need to be overcome to make this adoption simpler and faster. In particular:
• High dependency on cloud infrastructure provider (vendor lock-in);
• Orchestration and management of the lifecycle of Multi-Cloud Application Deployments;
• Management and effectively projecting cost budgets of their services and core products distributed across multiple clouds;
• Tackling security, compliance and code vulnerabilities by designing software security mechanisms to prevent data breaches and ensure customer privacy;
• Tackling data protection privacy constraints and restrictions due to national and EU directives for data movement across application tiers, availability regions or multiple cloud sites.

The objectives for the project include:

Project Objective I – to facilitate the design and deployment of cloud applications and services by developing a security and elasticity by design framework which is independent of the underlying infrastructure and cloud deployment environment
Project Objective II – to improve developers’ productivity by reducing cloud application design time via code annotations and blueprints for security and portability allowing developers to focus on application core functionality
Project Objective III – to prove the applicability, usability, effectiveness and value of the UNICORN concept, models and mechanisms in industrial, real-life trustworthy services, applications and standards demonstrating and stress-testing the developed UNICORN artefacts, methodologies and services under pragmatic conditions against a pre-defined set of use cases.

Work performed

The first project phase – the design and analysis phase (months M1-M9) – included the identification and analysis of stakeholder requirements, the development of the UNICORN reference architecture (WP1) and the kick-off of WP2-WP5. The approach for dissemination, exploitation and communication has been elaborated (WP7).
The main tasks of the project during the design and analysis phase were:
• The identification and analysis of stakeholder requirements including clear and basic functional, non-functional and technical requirements for an aligned development of the IT components of UNICORN – with the results documented in Deliverable D1.1 Stakeholders Requirements Analysis and Deliverable (delivered by month M6);
• The development of a UNICORN reference architecture that describes the overall framework of UNICORN with its main components and artefacts as well as the specific interfaces needed for information exchange – with the results documented in Deliverable D1.2 UNICORN Reference Architecture (delivered by month M9);
• The definition of the supported UNICORN Use Cases that build up the base for the later on development of the UNICORN demonstrators (D1.2);
• The development of a concept for communication activities handling reporting as well as for data management that defines handling of data during the project – with the results documented in Deliverable D7.1 Communication Roadmap and Deliverable D7.7 Data Management Plan (delivered by month M3).

The second project phase, the initial development (months 10-15), dealt with the joint RTD activities in work packages WP2-WP5 following an iterative approach that foresees a close collaboration among these work packages. The initial development phase resulted in several technical prototypes regarding the design and development of the UNICORN Libraries, packaging and deployment tool, multi-cloud Orchestration as well as the security and privacy mechanisms. These prototypes are the first part of the two-cycle development and integration approach in UNICORN.

The last three months of the first reporting period launched the third project phase– the continuous development, integration and validation phase (months M16-36) with further development of the UNICORN Libraries, packaging and deployment tool, multi-cloud Orchestration as well as the security and privacy mechanisms in alignment to the already mentioned two-cycle development and integration approach. Furthermore, the design and development of the evaluation framework has been completed, while planning of the demonstrators has started.

In addition, we report success with respect to dissemination, exploitation and communication (part of WP7) – such as ten papers and two newsletters published, two technical blog posts disseminated in seven channels, three presentations delivered and three posters presented in conferences, as well as six scientific conferences attended with more than 300 participants. Precisely, the 25th IEEE International Symposium on the Modelling, Analysis, and Simulation of Computer and Telecommunication Systems (MASCOTS), the 11th Symposium and Summer School On Service-Oriented Computing in Crete and the Collaborative European Research Conference (CERC) have been attended in 2017 – documented in Deliverables D7.1 Communication Roadmap (delivered by month M3) and in the interim dissemination, communication and standardisation reports. At the same time, WP7 started elaborating stakeholder identification, value proposition of UNICORN and associated market analysis.

Final results

The aim of the UNICORN project is to empower the European digital SME and Startup eco-system by delivering a novel and unified framework that simplifies the design, deployment and management of secure and elastic-by- design cloud applications that follow the micro-service architectural paradigm and can be deployed over multi- cloud programmable execution environments. UNICORN by nature is a technological advanced project and the innovation activities leading towards designing and implementing the UNICORN eco-system are based upon both utilizing and contributing to popular open-source and EU co-funded projects. In respect to microservices, UNICORN aspires to facilitate the DevOps teams in adopting the microservice architectural paradigm by providing a unified web IDE for development, deployment and management of cloud applications. Going beyond the offerings of the existing platforms, UNICORN puts particular emphasis on security, scalability and elasticity control enabled through policy and constraint definition, as well as through continuous risk and vulnerability assessment, and complements its solution with advanced orchestration and monitoring capabilities.
As an innovative and advanced technologically project, UNICORN, among its original development it will also provide contributions to open-source projects. Like any new and innovative technology, UNICORN will walk the extra mile and will contribute, either add-ons or extensions, to the communities of these popular and open-source projects. The key contributions of UNICORN include:
• An extension for Kubernetes to support cross-cloud network overlay management.
• Introducing a new CWA standard for supporting analytics insights and scaling policies for microservices.
• The creation of the Eclipse Che plug-in.

Website & more info

More info: http://unicorn-project.eu.