Contrail project
Contrail was a Cloud Federation computing project that ran from 2010-10-01 until 2014-01-31. This website summarizes the results and activities of the project. Please remember that the longer the project has passed, the less relevant the information will be. Most of the software is further developed in other projects. In most cases, the software components web sites are a good starting point for further investigation.
For a quick overview download the Contrail Flyer (3 Mbyte) or the infographic (16 Mbyte).
For a 50 page summary of the Contrail technology, download the White Paper (15 Mbyte)
ConSec
ConSec
The aim of ConSec is to provide a means for users to use external identities to authenticate to service providers: any acceptable external identity can be used to identify users to any internal service managed by the federation.
The user thus gets single sign-on: this means that an identity used for other purposes can be used with any federation resource, and, that, depending on the timing and technology used, the user will only need to log in once.
ConPaaS
Contrail's PaaS component ConPaaS provides a zero-configuration running and load-balancing of a set of applications and databases. You can compose your complex application out of these basic building blocks.
ConPaaS today runs on top of Amazon EC2 and OpenNebula based clouds and Contrail federated clouds. To use ConPaaS, you need to install the ConPaaS user portal only once. For EC2, ConPaaS AMIs are being provided, for OpenNebula clouds, VM images can be built easily following the provided scripts.
XtreemFS
XtreemFS is a secure and fault-tolerant file system for the cloud. It has been designed to store peta-scale data volumes across large numbers of distributed servers, while it behaves like a local file system with POSIX semantics from a user's point of view.
XtreemFS has been specifically tailored to the use in cloud computing environments. The modular design makes it possible to start with a small-scale installation and scale it out when necessary.
VEP
VEP is a cloud middleware software that interfaces multiple Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) clouds and presents end-users with an interface facilitating easy deployment and application life cycle management of distributed applications made up of several inter-networked virtual machines.
Applications to be deployed are described using DMTF's Open Virtualization Format (version 1.1.0) standard. The software allows the deployment of any standard OVF application and full lifecycle management of the application after deployment until its termination on the provider's cloud.
Demonstrator
In a real production scenario, almost all critical aspects of the technology developed by Contrail have been tested under heavy load conditions, and information on performance, scalability, security, and usability issues collected and reported so that corrective actions and fine tuning of the Contrail framework can be accomplished. A Multimedia Marketplace has been chosen as the "Demonstrator".
A Demonstrator Environment has been set up and linked from the Contrail public portal, where interested users can find relevant information, and run the Demonstrator.