BonFIRE

Facility Services
The BonFIRE (Building service testbeds for Future Internet Research and Experimentation) Project will design, build and operate a multi-site cloud facility to support applications, services and systems research targeting the Internet of Services community within the Future Internet. The BonFIRE Project aims to give researchers access to an experimental facility which enables large scale experimentation of their systems and applications, the evaluation of cross-cutting effects of converged service and network infrastructures and the assessment of socio-economic and other non-technological impact.

How does the infrastructure work?
The BonFIRE Project will operate a Cloud facility based on an Infrastructure as a Service delivery model with guidelines, policies and best practices for experimentation. The BonFIRE Project will adopt a federated multi-platform approach providing interconnection and interoperation between novel service and networking testbeds. The platform will offer advanced services and tools for services research including cloud federation, virtual machine management, service modelling, service lifecycle management, service level agreements, quality of service monitoring and analytics. Where appropriate the BonFIRE Project will reuse and adapt existing tools from other FIRE projects such as Panlab, Federica and Deisa.

What can be tested and how?
The BonFIRE Project will support experimentation and testing of innovative scenarios from the Internet of Services research community specifically focused on the convergence of services and networks. Three scenarios are envisaged:

• Extended cloud: the extension of current cloud offerings towards a federated facility with heterogeneous virtualized resources and best-effort Internet interconnectivity.
• Cloud with emulated network implications: a controlled network environment by providing an experimental network emulation platform to service developers, where topology configuration and resource usage is under full control of the experimental researcher.
• Extended cloud with complex physical network implications: investigates federation mechanisms for an experimental cloud system that interconnects individual BonFIRE sites with Federica, Open Cirrus and Panlab.

The BonFIRE Project will provide innovative methods for describing, deploying, managing, executing, measuring and removing experiments including:

• Uniform test description and deployment descriptors for all the scenarios (including cross-cutting tests)
• Cloud resource federation through the federation of clouds in different administrative domains that provide physical resources to the BonFIRE Project
• User-friendly user interfaces at the facility's entry point with an easy to use portal

Usage Scenarios
BonFIRE will support experiments exploring the interactions between novel service and network infrastructures. Three initial scenarios have been defined to highlight the general classes of experiment that can be supported by the facility. The scenarios include:

• Extended cloud scenario: the extension of current cloud offerings towards a federated facility with heterogeneous virtualized resources and best-effort Internet interconnectivity.
• Cloud with emulated network implications: a controlled network environment by providing an experimental network emulation platform to service developers, where topology configuration and resource usage is under full control of the experimental researcher.
• Extended cloud with complex physical network implications: investigates federation mechanisms for an experimental cloud system that interconnects individual BonFIRE sites with Federica, Open Cirrus and Panlab.

The first scenario offers the most basic facilities, and scenarios 2 and 3 extend the capabilities. The scenarios are the starting point for BonFIRE in terms of detailing some of the enabling technology which will be used in the first implementations of the testbed. It is essential that these scenarios are mature and simple enough to allow an early implementation of BonFIRE to be deployed, while allowing for extension as the project progresses and user needs develop.

Website: www.bonfire-project.eu [3]

Monitoring-as-a-Service

Development of the BonFIRE monitoring system. It has a two-fold objective. First, it is used to assure health and performance of the BonFIRE infrastructure and its internal services. Second, it provides service related measurements that are acquired while experiments are carried out utilizing the BonFIRE experimental facility.

It supports measurements and monitoring at multiple levels:

• Infrastructure-level monitoring

• VM-level monitoring

• Software/application-level monitoring

Elasticity-as-a-Service

The elasticity as a service is a feature that allows experimenters to run an elastic experiment. Elasticity means that is possible to dynamically increase or decrease the number of computing resources to cope with different situation of load.

Detailed information about the monitoring system of the BonFIRE facility and elasticity services can be found in the BonFIRE documentation here [4].

J. Á. L. D. Castillo, K. Mallichan and Y. Al-Hazmi. OpenStack Federation in Experimentation Multi-cloud Testbeds. Proceeding of the IEEE 5th International Conference on Cloud Computing Technology and Science (CloudCom), vol. 2, pp 51-56, Bristol, UK, December 5, 2013.
ISBN: 978-0-7695-5095-4/1
PDF [5].

D. G. Pérez, J. Á. L. D. Castillo, Y. Al-Hazmi, J. Martrat, K. Kavoussanakis, A. C. Hume, C. V. López, G. Landi, T. Wauters, M. Gienger and D. Margery. Cloud and Network Facilities Federation in BonFIRE. Proceeding of the first international FedICI'2013 workshop on Federative and interoperable cloud infrastructures, vol. 8374, pp 126-135, Aachen, Germany, August 26, 2013.
ISBN: 978-3-642-54419-4
PDF [6].

G. Carella, F. Schreiner, K. Campowsky, and T. Magedanz. Elasticity as a Service for Federated Cloud Testbeds. Second Workshop on Clouds, Networks and Data Centers (CNDC - IEEE - ICC 2013), Budapest, June 2013.

Y. Al-Hazmi, and T. Magedanz. A Flexible Monitoring System for Federated Future Internet Testbeds. Proceeding of the 3rd IEEE International Conference on the Network of the Future (IEEE NoF 2012), pp. 1-6, Tunis, Tunisia, Nov 2012.

ISBN: 978-1-4673-5263-5
PDF [8]

A. C. Hume, Y. Al-Hazmi, B. Belter, K. Campowsky, L. M. Carril, G. Carrozzo, V. Engen, D. G. Pérez, J. J. Ponsatí, R. Kübert, Y. Liang, C. Rohr, G. V. Seghbroeck. BonFIRE: A Multi-cloud Test Facility for Internet of Services Experimentation. To appear in the Proceeding of the 8th International Conference on Testbeds and Research Infrastructures for the Development of Networks & Communities — TRIDENTCOM 2012.

BonFIRE: a multi-site Cloud experimentation and testing facility:

BonFIRE Video at YouTube
 

BonFIRE Webinar on features, sites and client tools

BonFIRE Webinar at YouTube [9]