Part I Sciencific achievements
5.2 Management Interfaces for Eucalyptus Cloud
and the system requirements previously defined (i.e. phase 2 of decision making step), by migrating the information (i.e. phase 1 of decision making step) to the cloud service [R 130].
5.1.4 Management step
After migrating to cloud services, enterprises must manage the deployed cloud. It can be done by using two management functions: business and operational. The Business management function, also called administrative group by [R 47] guarantees business supports for: customer management, contract management, inventory management, accounting and billing, pricing and ratings, metering and SLA management [R 46] [R 91].
The operational management function or resource management group (in [R 47]), is handling the provisioning/configuration operations and portability/interoperability operations [R 91] [R 46] [R 130].
Other related works together with a comparative analyze related to our work, are detailed presented in [R 130].
This section may be used as a guide for improving the efficiency, quality and capacity management of enterprises to move their data and applications into cloud. Furthermore, a well-done migration process to cloud services decreases the enterprise’s expenditure for decision making as regards transition into cloud.
The holistic migration process presented is only a qualitative research, which doesn’t provide a case study for evaluating the described process. However, this will be part of our future work.
Related with the open-source platforms, in [R 30] [R 186] [R 156] were realized researches regarding the open source toolkits (i.e. Eucalyptus, Xen Cloud Platform, Open Nebula, Nimbus etc).
According with Tianfield (2011) the cloud architecture consists of Cloud Platform Architecture (CPA) and Cloud Application Architecture (CAA) [R 199]. The management process for these architecture starts with the operating systems, which manages the physical infrastructure; the management process is followed by the hypervisor, which has the job to dynamically provision and manage the virtual machines (VMs); it continues with Cloud APIs (Application Programming Interface), which include management and customer portals. At the CAA level, the granularity of cloud management is increased by cloud brokers, which work with the associated cloud ontologies and the Business Service Process (BSP) layer which performs Business Service Management (BSM), Service Level Agreement (SLA), service orchestrations and process management [R 199] [R 129].
5.2.1 Eucalyptus Community Cloud Interface Management
Eucalyptus is the acronym for Elastic Utility Computing Architecture Linking Your Programs To Useful Systems. It is an open-source cloud platform, developed by University of California for creating private and hybrid clouds and supported today by Eucalyptus Systems, a Canonical Partner; it also provides a commercial version, called Eucalyptus Enterprise Edition [R 61] [R 129].
According with administrator’s guide provided by [R 62] the Eucalyptus architecture includes five components (Figure 56): Cloud Controller (CLC), Walrus, Cluster Controller (CC), Storage Controller (SC) and Node Controller (NC); these are detailed in [R 129].
The Node Controller (NC) is responsible for handling the hosting of virtual machines instances on every node and for the management of the virtual network endpoint.
Figure 56 Eucalyptus Architecture [R 129]
Each cluster is formed by a collection of NCs sharing a LAN segment [R 62] and it has:
• A Cluster Controller is the element that collects information about VMs and deals with the VMs scheduling on particular NCs; CC must contain NCs which are in the same broadcast domain (Ethernet). Cluster Controller decides where to place the request received from the Cloud Controller, by evaluating which Node Controller has sufficient free resources [5].
• A Storage Controller (SC) – was developed to have the same capabilities as Amazon Elastic Block Storage (EBS) and to be able to communicate with others storage systems (NFS, iSCSI etc) [R 59].
Cloud Controller (CLC) treats the incoming requests and provides high level resource scheduling by collaborating with the Cluster Controllers [R 61].
Cloud Controller is the interface to the management platform, ability which is developed using the Amazon Elastic Cloud Computing (EC2) and a Web-based user interface.
Walrus module is used for storing data. It is situated at the same level in the architecture like Cloud Controller and has compatible interface with Amazon S3 [R 61].
5.2.2 Cloud Management Tools 5.2.2.1 Cloud User Interfaces
In terms of user roles the interface is the same for all 3 types of users (i.e. consumer, provider and developer), but with different rules, policies and constraints for each user role.
Because of the specific functionality of provider portal based on the user roles [R 49], the provider interface includes [R 129]:
1. The Service Development Portal - the interface used by cloud service developers to deploy new cloud services.
2. The Service Provider Portal - assures for its customers a service management of the following functionalities: operations, business and transition.
3. The Service Consumer Portal has the same management functions as the service provider portal with the difference that service consumer portal has involved different access rights with different capabilities: consumer service manager, consumer service administrator and service user [R 49].
The taxonomy of the management functions in the provider interface, was realized by extracting and analyzing each management service from the Cloud Service Management structure provided by NIST [R 90] and integrating them in the corresponding functions of the provider interface from [R 49] [R 129].
1. Business management functions (called administrative group in [R 48]) [R 129].
Guaranties the following business support:
• customer management contains the following sub-functions: subscription management, customer account management and entitlement management
• contract management
• inventory management contains the following sub-functions: service offering management, service request management and order management
• accounting and billing contains the following sub-functions: billing, clearing and settlement, accounts payable, accounts receivable
• pricing and rating contains the following sub-functions: pricing, billing and service offering catalog
• metering
• SLA management
2. Operational management function (called resource management group in [R 48]) [R 129].
Is related with the provisioning/configuration operations and portability/interoperability operations [R 90].
The provisioning/configuration operations include the following tasks:
• rapid provisioning
• monitoring and reporting
• reporting and auditing
According with [R 48] the portability/interoperability operations compose the transition management functions and it regards:
• resource change
• data portability
• service interoperability
• system portability
5.2.2.2 Eucalyptus Management Tools
This section regards Eucalyptus management tools for the consumer role. The service consumer portal has the following capabilities: consumer service manager, consumer service administrator and service user [R 49] [R 129].
Eucalyptus Management Tools are classified as:
1. Web based management: Eucalyptus Admin Interface 2. Client tools:
a. Command line tool: Euca2ools b. API Client: Typica
c. Graphical User Interfaces (GUI) client: Firefox Plugins, Cloud42, tAWS Tanacasino, EC2 Dream
d. Third party Management tools: RightScale, enStratus, IMOD Kaavo, CloudWatch, Scarl, Tapin, Cloudkick
1. Web based management
It is also called administrator web interface because administrators have more management tasks to achieve using this interface, comparing with the tasks that can be performed by users, who have other management alternatives. It ensures the interaction with ECC IaaS cloud, by providing the provisioning operation, which should be accepted by administrator [R 129].
The management operations that are accessible by users are: user provisioning, catalog of available images [R 129].
The management operations that are accessible by administrators: Identity Management (adding users, user accounts Management), Configuration Management, Catalog of available images, Catalog of services [R 60] [R 129].
Note that ECC don’t allow end-users the images management capability; ECC has its own catalog of images, created by administrator, and offered for use to the end-users [R 129].
The access of the users to the ECC administrative graphical interface is realized through the following URL: https://ecc.eucalyptus.com:8443 [R 129].
2. Client tools
The client tools presented covers the EC2 functionality of Eucalyptus cloud [R 129].
a. Command line based management (euca2ools)
Euca2ools is based on Web-services software packages (Axis2, Apache and Rampart) and it has capabilities identical with Amazon EC2 [R 186] [R 149]. The authentication procedure for users requires downloading the needed keys via a zip file [R 186]. The authentication solution are solution ES-security mechanisms (X.509 credentials) [R 61] [R 201].
euca2ools client software assures the user interaction with ECC. It provides the following management drivers: SSH key management, security group management, image management, instance management, storage management and IP address management. These management functionalities of Euca2ools are well documented, which helps the Eucalyptus users but it is slower compared with GUI clients, because it is a command line tool, which marks the lack of convenience functions [R 129].
a. API Client: Typica
Typica is a client Java library useful for Java developers who work with the Amazon web services. It has a poor documentation and it accesses the Amazon’s API at a low level, Typica was used in several projects (e.g. enStratus, g-Eclipse, AWS Manger, Cloud Studio, Elastic Web etc). Table 17 covers the advantages and disadvantage of Typica [R 129].
a. Graphical User Interfaces (GUI)
Firefox Plugins are GUI and are built as an extension of Mozilla Firefox. First, appears the Elasticfox plugin, which had the advantages of managing the Amazon EC2 accounts and it is an easy to use interface. Hybridfox plugin provides compatibility between a public cloud (Amazon) and a private cloud (Eucalyptus) and in the same time it supports more features of Eucalyptus than Elasticfox, being an extended Elasticfox project.
Table 17 covers the advantages and disadvantages of this tool.
Command
line tool Type Strenghts Limitations
Euca2ools Command line [R 186] [R 149]
[R 61] [R 201]
• management drivers: SSH key management, security groups management, image
management, instance management, storage management and IP address management
• it is well documented
• lack of convenience functions
Typica Client Java library [R 58] [R 77]
[R 65]
• reliable client Java library for a variety of Amazon web services
• convenient for Java developers
• poor documentation
• access the Amazon’s API at a low level
Elasticfox
GUI –Mozilla Firefox plugins
[R 65] [R 78]
[R 40]
• manages Amazon EC2 and Eucalyptus accounts
• easy to work with it, no need to separate documentation
• it’s not web based
• restricted to EC2 environment
• don’t have the ability to copy files between instances
Hybridfox
• provides compatibility between Amazon and Eucalyptus clouds
• supports more features of Eucalyptus than Elasticfox
• -easy to work with it
• it’s not web based
Cloud42 open-source management interface for
every EC2 compatible services [R 58] [R 65]
[R 107]
• 2 interfaces types: web-based GUI and web service interface
• provides basic and extended functionality (file transfer functionalities from a EMI instance into another EMI instance, controlling EC2 server instances remotely)
• support for Elastic IP addresses is missing
tAWS
Tanacasino GUI
management tool for Amazon
EC2 [R 58]
• Eclipse GUI management tool for Amazon EC2
• easy to work with it
• provides basic functionality
• it’s not web based
EC2 Dream
desktop admin
client [R 58] • free desktop admin client
• same functionalities like Amazon EC2 • poor documentation
• it’s not web based
Table 17 Euca2ools evaluation [R 129]
Cloud42 is an open-source management interface for every EC2 compatible services, which includes 2 types of interfaces: web-based GUI and web service interface. Table 17 covers the advantages and disadvantages of this tool.
tAWS Tanacasino is another GUI management tool for Amazon EC2 [R 58] should be installed and is similar with Firefox plugin Elasticfox. Table 17 covers the advantages and disadvantages of this tool.
EC2 Dream is a free desktop admin client which has the same functionalities like Amazon EC2 command line. It is a hybrid cloud admin which manages the Amazon EC2, RDS, Eucalyptus, OpenStack Compute and CloudStack. Table 17 covers the advantages and disadvantages of this tool.
b. Third party cloud management tools
This third-party cloud management tools are used by organization that want to manage their cloud infrastructure. These are commercial versions and provide free trials for several weeks (i.e. 1 or 2 weeks), except RightScale, which offer the opportunity to create free account for managing the Eucalyptus cloud.
The RightScale 3rd party management creates an optimized user experience by providing a Dashboard with the cloud resources pool, which are automated [R 175].
