Contrail will vertically integrate an open-source distributed operating system for autonomous resource management in Infrastructure-as-a-Service environments, and high level services and runtime environments as foundations for Platform-as-a-Service.

The main achievement will be a tightly integrated software stack in open source including a comprehensive set of system, runtime and high level services providing standardized interfaces for supporting cooperation and resource sharing over Cloud federations.

Contrail will address key technological challenges in existing commercial and academic Clouds: the lack of standardized rich and stable interfaces; limited trust from customers; and relatively poor Quality of Service (QoS) guarantees regarding the performance and availability of Cloud resources. Addressing these important issues is fundamental to support large user communities formed of individual citizens and/or organizations relying on Cloud resources for their mission-critical applications.

The main contribution of CONTRAIL is an integrated approach to virtualization, offering Infrastructure-as-a-Service, services for IaaS Cloud Federation, and Platform-as-a-Service. It will aim at equalling current commercial Clouds, and surpassing them in a number of selected key domains to facilitate industrial up-take of Federated Cloud computing.

The expected outputs of CONTRAIL are as follows:

A collection of infrastructure services offering network, computation and storage as a service:

• Virtual infrastructure networks (VIN) based on self-organizing overlays for network-controlled data;
• Virtual cluster platforms (VCP) managing computation resources; and
• A reliable, scalable and globally distributed file system (GAFS) for users and Cloud infrastructures.
• Services to federate IaaS Clouds: – Identity management across Cloud federations;
• Management of federation policies such as security and resource sharing policies;
• SLA management at federation and node level for different resource types; and 
• Autonomic resource management through monitoring and accounting.

A collection of PaaS services to support typical Cloud applications: – High-throughput elastic structured storage;

• Automatic set-up and configuration of SQL servers within the Cloud; and
• Geographically distributed key/value store.

A collection of run-time environments providing elasticity, scalability and performance dependability to selected classes of applications:

• An efficient map/reduce implementation;
• Scalable hosting for service-oriented applications; and
• Autonomic workflow execution.

A collection of applications from the domains of e-business, e-science, telecommunication and media using and demonstrating the advantages of the CONTRAIL open-source system:

• Distributed Provision of Geo-referentiated Data;
• Multimedia Processing Service Marketplace;
• Clouds for High Performance Real-Time Scientific Data Analysis; and
• Large-scale Code Analysis using Clouds for Open Source software.