Hello,

We would like to invite the ConPaaS community at large to attend the 1st ConPaaS workshop. This workshop will be held on Thursday June 13th in Amsterdam. As you probably know, ConPaaS is constantly growing with new features and possibilities being added every few weeks. The ConPaaS workshop aims to offer a forum for ConPaaS developers and users to meet each other, learn about recent developments, and have a chance to influence the roadmap for the next releases.

Registration:

If you would like to attend the workshop, please send an email to Guillaume before June 1st. There is no registration fee.

Program:

• 9:30-10:00: Opening + the state of the ConPaaS union (Guillaume Pierre + Thilo Kielmann)
• 10:00-11:00: ConPaaS architecture (Emanuele Rocca)
• 11:00-11:30: break
• 11:30-12:00: Latest news from the BATS service (Bert Ijff)
• 11:30-12:30: Experience report from a happy ConPaaS user (Ian Johnson)
• 12:30-13:30: lunch
• 13:30-14:00: ConPaaS service development tutorial (Emanuele Rocca)
• 14:30-15:00: Latest news from the MYSQL services (Ales Cernivec)
• 15:00-15:30: Accelerating VM startup times (Kaveh Razavi)
• 15:30-16:00: break
• 16:00-16:30: The scalarix service and its resource provisioning mechanisms (Thorsten)
• 16:30-17:00: Dynamic resource provisioning for the PHP service (Hector)
• 17:30-18:00: Planned extensions for the Harness and MC-data projects (Guillaume)
• 18:00-18:30: Closing and discussion on the roadmap towards the end of Contrail and beyond

Amsterdam February 4th 2013. The Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam and the Contrail consortium are proud to announce Contrail PaaS (ConPaaS) release 1.1. Until ConPaaS, considerable system administrator skills were needed to deploy applications in the Cloud. ConPaaS simplifies the way applications can be started and managed in the Cloud. With ConPaaS, deploying applications making full use of the capabilities of the Cloud requires only a few mouse clicks.

ConPaaS provides a collection of scalable, cloud-ready services for hosting various types of applications. The previous release 1.0 already supported PHP, Java, SQL, NoSQL, Hadoop and TaskFarming services. Release 1.1 completes this with the XtreemFS POSIX file system service which allows ConPaaS applications to share data through files as in a single local machine.

Other major improvements are the introduction of the ConPaaS director which allows users to control their ConPaaS services entirely using command-line tools. This simplifies things for advanced developers and allows them to automate a number of common operations. Also, application developers can now fully configure their services by providing startup scripts to be executed automatically on newly created virtual machines.

“We are very proud of this new ConPaaS release”, says Guillaume Pierre, who is leading the research and development team. “Thanks to the newly introduced functionalities we are now ready to start eating our own dog food, and to rely exclusively on ConPaaS technology to host the www.conpaas.eu website.” The ConPaaS team in Amsterdam instantly took his word seriously and organized a grand dinner where “ConPaaS dog food” was served.

The ConPaaS team is proud to announce the availability of ConPaaS-1.0.0. This is a major release which features a number of important improvements compared to the 0.9.0 release:

• All internal control communications between ConPaaS entities are now secured. This means that attackers will not be able to take control over a user’s services nor disrupt their operations.
• Similarly, by default the ConPaaS frontend is now configured to run over HTTPS rather than HTTP.
• TaskFarming service: this is a new service dedicated to the efficient execution of large number of independent tasks.
• Selenium service: this is a new service dedicated to the functional testing of Web applications.
• The PHP and Java services now have a new GIT-based method for code uploads.
• ConPaaS can now run in any availability zone at Amazon Web Services.
• The installation procedure has been greatly simplified with an install script which automates most things.

ConPaaS is a runtime environment for hosting applications in the cloud. It aims at offering the full power of the cloud to application developers while shielding them from the associated complexity of the cloud. ConPaaS is designed to host both high-performance scientific applications and online Web applications.  It automates the entire life-cycle of an application, including collaborative development, deployment, performance monitoring, and automatic scaling. Finally, it runs on a variety of public and private clouds, and is easily extensible. This allows developers to focus their attention on application-specific concerns rather than on cloud-specific details. For more information about the ConPaaS project as a whole we recommend this recently-published article.

To try the new release the simplest option is ConPaaS Online: new users can register and try the system for free during a limited period.

The ConPaaS team is busier than ever in building new functionality and in making ConPaaS an even better system. Stay tuned for the next releases!

We are pleased to announce the official publication of a new paper about ConPaaS which describes the current status and future plans of the system.

Guillaume Pierre, Corina Stratan, “ConPaaS: A Platform for Hosting Elastic Cloud Applications,” IEEE Internet Computing, pp. 88-92, Sept.-Oct. 2012.

The ConPaaS team is proud to announce the release of ConPaaS-0.9.0.

ConPaaS is a runtime environment for hosting applications in the cloud. It aims at offering the full power of the cloud to application developers while shielding them from the associated complexity of the cloud. ConPaaS is designed to host both high-performance scientific applications and online Web applications. It automates the entire life-cycle of an application, including collaborative development, deployment, performance monitoring, and automatic scaling. Finally, it runs on a variety of public and private clouds, and is easily extensible. This allows developers to focus their attention on application-specific concerns rather than on cloud-specific details.

ConPaaS-0.9.0 contains five services specialized for different tasks:

• PHP Web hosting service
• Java Web hosting service
• MySQL database service
• Scalarix NoSQL key-value store
• MapReduce service

Each service is self-contained and fully elastic. This means that increasing or decreasing the processing capacity of ConPaaS services is entirely automated. The application owner only has to click one button in the Web interface to trigger such reconfigurations. Services can be easily composed. For example, the user guide contains a short tutorial explaining how to install WordPress on ConPaaS using the PHP and MySQL services.

ConPaaS-0.9.0 runs on Amazon’s EC2 as well as OpenNebula. Besides the regular software release, ConPaaS is also available in two different forms which make testing easy:

• ConPaaS Online is a public installation of ConPaaS. It offers a free trial feature so anyone can create an account and start using the system freely.
• We also provide ready-made images for Amazon EC2. Using these images, starting your own ConPaaS system requires only a few minutes.

Please note that ConPaaS-0.9.0 has one important caveat: the system is not fully secured yet so advanced attackers would be able to carry out successful attacks. This means that the system is suitable for private cloud environments where users are trusted, or for demonstration purposes in public clouds. Implementing full security obviously features at the very top of our current to-do list.

For any information, question or feedback about ConPaaS, please contact us at info@conpaas.eu.

We are working hard towards releasing the first full version of ConPaaS. This version will contain support for Web applications written in PHP and Java, the MySQL database, a NoSQL database, and elastic MapReduce for massive data processing. Stay tuned!

On November 24th Guillaume Pierre gave a presentation about ConPaaS at the OW2con conference, focusing on ConPaaS from an open-source perspective. He also discussed future plans for ConPaaS as a whole and gave a live demo of the system. The video of his presentation is now available.

Take a look at the new ConPaaS demo!

Today we had the occasion of successfully showcasing the latest version of ConPaaS. The new version integrates several new types of services:

• Scalarix: a scalable transactional key-value store (i.e., a NoSQL database)
• MapReduce: a high-performance framework for parallel computing
• Java: Web servers hosting static content and Java servlets
• PHP: Web servers hosting static content and PHP documents

Two more services are almost ready and will be integrated soon:

• MySQL: a ConPaaS service built around the famous relational database
• BagsOfTasks: a high-performance execution framework for scientific computing

These new services will be made available for download and in the public testbed as soon as possible. In the mean time, you may want to take a look at the following screenshots.

Today ConPaaS has reached an important milestone: we are ready to go public! Everyone interested in ConPaaS is welcome to visit our public testbed and get a free account. The platform lets deploy Web applications in the Cloud in one click, and control the amount of resources used by your application in another click.

Are you interested in ConPaaS? If so, then why not give it a try?