The rapid growth of the Cloud computing business model and Internet services as a whole have raised the need for development of highly scalable applications and middleware and of more effective service engineering methodologies for scalable infrastructures. This project aims to improve the state of the art in both areas.
Rapid Prototyping of Scalable Applications
In recent years we have witnessed several successful businesses (Google, Amazon, Yahoo, Facebook, etc.) developing custom scalable applications from scratch to respond to their rapidly-growing business needs. Such applications are typically designed and built using distributed systems practices, adapted to suit the specific application semantics and other requirements, using commodity systems infrastructure. These efforts require large teams of experts, which are hard to recruit and command high salaries, and result in significant monetary cost as well as considerable design and development times. High startup costs are important inhibitors to the rapid development of future business applications to support innovation and growth in startup companies and small-and-medium-enterprises (SMEs), particularly in the European space.
This project aims to improve the current ad-hoc scalable application design and development methodology by offering application designers upfront the necessary scalable software services and system support, as well as a guided design approach towards working prototypes, drastically reducing development cost. Using these services, application designers can rapidly progress from a high-level specification of their specific application requirements, access semantics, and other application invariants, to a prototype of their scalable application.
Infrastructure Services Engineering
The recent emergence and popularity of Cloud computing is evidence to the growing importance of service-based computing not only for the enterprise sector but for society as a whole. Large-scale infrastructure providers today need to adapt their management processes to the widely varying workloads presented to them by an increasing number of SMEs. At the same time, a sizeable segment of enterprises prefer to implement private cloud solutions at their own infrastructure but lack the expertise to effectively manage it. There is thus a need for service-based large-scale infrastructure management over a heterogeneous client base.
This project explores and advances the technologies necessary for the engineering of flexible infrastructure services for the above described problems. Key components of our approach are the discovery of cross-layer relationships between infrastructure and application tiers, large-scale configuration management repositories to support a wide range of processes, and flexible engineering of on-demand services to adapt to specific client needs.
ScaleWorks is a Marie Curie IEF Project, Contract No. PIEF-GA-2009-237677
Project funded by the European Commission 7 th Framework Program.
