Contrail Release 1.3 Contrail Release 1.3

Contrail release 1.3  is now available for testing.

The  Contrail release 1.3 is made for the security enthusiasts who wish to know more about securing the access to a federated Cloud infrastructure. The focus of this release is to provide the building blocks that will enable fine-grained security and which will be used in the final release of the Contrail platform. The developers demonstrate the usage of external Identity Providers with a Single Sign On (SSO) feature and the usage of OAuth tokens as a basis for the next release.

What's new in the release?

  •  Support for external Identity Providers (for example allowing login over Google)
  •  Support for SAML (exchange of attributes during login)
  •  Support for OAuth2 standard (securing API with OAuth tokes between the component calls)
  •  Authorization Server (fine grained control of token usage for the users and administrators)
  •  Dynamic-CA (for temporary services such as software defined networks SDNs for applications)
  •  Bug fixes of existing components


Release 1.3 builds upon a previous release 1.2 which introduced:

  • SLA Manager on the provider level,
  • Virtual Infrastructure Network (VIN),
  • Federation updates to reflect additional functionality (SLA and VIN support),
  • Updates have been made to the security part as well, adding basic OAuth 2.0 functionality.

 

More information: Contrail Software

Interested in a trial: Contrail testing

Business customers addressed by this Release:

  • IT Service companies
  • Private Clouds
  • Public Clouds
  • Cloud Brokers
  • Community Cloud

  

   

   

  

   

  

   

Meet Contrail Meet Contrail

January 23, 2014 Contrail Business Day Rome, Italy

Cloud Summerschool Cloud Summerschool

The Cloud Summer School 2013 did take place from July 22 to July 26 in Almere, the Netherlands

White Paper White Paper

The Contrail White Paper "Overview of the Contrail system, components and usage" is available for download. The White Paper provides an overview of the Contrail system and components and describes several use cases and business opportunities.

Videos Videos

Security in Contrail - Interview with Jens Jensen STFC.

The status of the Contrail Project - Christine Morin

XLAB in the Contrail project.

Federating the Cloud Federating the Cloud

Supply of, and demand for computational capacity is elastic. Some companies are are falling short, others have capacity in abundance. More often than not the need or surplus in computational power or storage capacity is temporary. Wouldn't it be wonderful if the surplus of one corporation could (temporarily) alleviate the wantage of the other. A consortium of ten organisations from six European countries started on a collaborative project to enable just that. The Contrail project aims to design, implement, evaluate and promote an open source computational cloud wherein users can limitlessy share resources.

The Contrail project will run for a period of three years and will show tangible results:

  1. Contrail will provide a complete Cloud platform which integrates a full Infrastructure-as-a-Service and Platform- as-a-Service offer.
  2. Contrail will allow Cloud providers to seamlessly integrate resources from other Clouds with their own infrastructure.
  3. Contrail will break the current customer lock-in situation by allowing live application migration from one cloud to another.
  4. Contrail will be fully available in open-source.

Contrail news Contrail news

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VEP 2.0 is now available

7/16/13 10:18 AM

Virtual Execution Platform is a Cloud middleware software that interfaces multiple Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) Clouds. VEP offers two types of services:

  1. management of data centres for a Cloud administrator allowing greater control on the physical resources;
  2. management of end-user distributed applications made up of several inter-networked virtual machines on a Cloud with an interface facilitating the deployment and application lifecycle management.

The VEP team is proud to announce VEP v2.0 (download link here), a new version replacing the old one (v1.1). The supported features are:

  • OpenNebula: VEP allows to manage a OpenNebula Cloud System offering a completely transparent interface
  • Open Standard support: VEP respects the DTMF OVF and CIMI standards
  • Data centre representation: VEP stores the provider data centre layout to enforce some SLA requirements
  • Physical resource allocation and resource provisioning for end user’s applications
  • Easy interfaces: easy browser based Cloud administrator and end-user application management interfaces
  • Application snapshot: creation of OVF file to redeploy the application at a later time or in another data centre
  • VM Scheduling: the new VEP scheduler is independent from the IaaS Scheduler to allow placement constraints on the resources
  • Advance Reservation: VEP allows to reserve a number of VMs from a start date to an end date to guarantee the deployment (in addition to run an application in best effort mode).

VEP aims at offering the full management of IaaS Cloud while shielding the administrators from the complexity of managing heterogeneous resources. VEP is designed to provide interoperability by offering a uniform way of representing and managing the resources of a Cloud provider. VEP could also easily enable the participation of a Cloud provider to a federation seamlessly and it does proper VM contextualization and application lifecycle management. Additionally it publishes application events and metrics for application’s monitoring and SLA enforcement.
VEP enables interoperability through its RESTful interface based on the DMTF’s Cloud Infrastructure Management Interface (CIMI) standard. The CIMI model defines a framework for the application life cycle management on a Cloud provider infrastructure, with applications generated from an Open Virtualization Format (OVF) document. VEP extends the CIMI API to support the deployment of applications under SLA terms.

VEP RESTful interface allows Cloud administrators to manage and control numerous aspect of the service offering. For VM scheduling to work properly, the data centre topology information is desired in VEP. The software has a simple and intuitive interface to allow administrators input topology information about their data centre. This interface also permits the administrator to selectively permit hosts to be managed via the VEP software. VEP never schedules a VM on a host not permitted for use by the administrator.

An Installation Guide and a User Guide is availabe at the VEP project site (https://project.inria.fr/vep/documentation/).

The VEP team is working hard to make VEP an even better system; the Openstack support is around the corner.
Stay tuned for the the next releases.

By Leslie Versweyveld
1219 Views,

Consortium Consortium

Contrail is a project managed by the Contrail consortium. Contrail is partially funded by the FP7  Programme of the European Commission under Grant Agreement FP7-ICT-257438.

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