Infrastructure as a service

In the future of corporate IT, companies will rely on highly dynamic distributed IT infra–structures. Federation models are envisioned where a given organisation will be both a Cloud provider during periods when its IT infrastructure is not used at its maximal capacity, and a Cloud customer in periods of peak activity.

The main contribution of Contrail will be the development of an integrated approach to virtualization, offering Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS), services for federating IaaS Clouds, and Platform as a Service (PaaS) on top of federated Clouds. This service stack will be part of the Contrail open source system, facilitating industrial up-take of Cloud computing.

The main output of Contrail will consist of:

• a collection of infrastructure services offering network, computation and storage as a service; services to federate IaaS Clouds;
• a collection of PaaS services to support typical Cloud applications;
• a collection of run-time environments providing elasticity, scalability and performance dependability to selected classes of applications; and
• a collection of applications and use cases from the domains of e-business, e-science, telecommunication and media using and demonstrating the Contrail system.

XtreemOS

Contrail will leverage the open source XtreemOS system, developed in the successful XtreemOS European integrated project and which was designed for large scale dynamic infrastructures.

XtreemOS integrates services for data, application, security and community management that can be adapted to provide a unified solution for building private, public and federated Cloud infrastructures. Contrail has core virtualization technology integrated with its high-level services and its Cloud managemen facilities. This unique approach of covering "the whole Cloud", from the core infrastructure, via federation mechanisms, to management services, enables the construction of transparent, trusted and reliable Cloud platforms with operations governed by service level agreements.

Open Clouds

After decades in which companies used to host their entire IT infrastructures in-house, a major shift is occurring where these infrastructures are outsourced to external operators such as Data Centers and Computing Clouds However, although this market is in rapid expansion in Europe, this growth may soon be hindered by user concerns such as lock-in within a single commercial offer (which reduces the necessary competition between many structure providers), ownership and privacy issues of the data stored in the Cloud, and the lack of performance predictability of current Clouds. 

To allow open access to shared computing resources, the vision of the Contrail project is that any organization should be able to be both a Cloud provider when its IT infrastructure is not used at its maximal capacity, and a Cloud customer in periods of peak activity

Resources that belong to different operators will be integrated into a single homogeneous Federated Cloud that users can access seamlessly