IRISA and the University of Rennes 1 (France) have an open position for a Postdoctoral researcher in the domain of cloud computing.

Title: energy-aware IaaS-PaaS co-design.

Description:

Modern IT infrastructures are big energy consumers. For example, in 2011 Google’s cloud (composed of 900,000 servers) had a total energy consumption around 2.6 TWh. This energy consumption by major cloud was estimated to increase around 15-20% every year. Reducing this energy consumption is an absolute necessity for economical as well as ecological reasons.

Many research efforts have been dedicated to reducing cloud energy consumption, in particular by optimizing the Infrastructure-as-a-Service layer of the Cloud. Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) is the layer in charge of the virtualization of physical resources, and therefore has direct control over energy-related elements. However, the IaaS layer has no knowledge about the nature of applications which run over these resources, which limits the scope of decisions it can take.

The EcoPaaS project therefore aim at making the IaaS layer (in charge of resources) and the PaaS layer (in charge of applications) collaborate to further reduce the Cloud energy consumption. The idea is to define standard interfaces that allow both layers to exchange relevant information and to coordinate their actions. Exchanging information will for example allow the PaaS layer to estimate the energy consumption of each application it is running. Coordinating actions will in turn allow the system to avoid situations where both layers simultaneously take mutually-damaging actions.

We will therefore investigate difficult scientific questions such as: which information can and should be exchanged between the two layers? What are the necessary coordination mechanisms to control reconfigurations and avoid detrimental side effects between the two layers? And which energy savings can we potentially obtain if we deployed such techniques in large commercial clouds?

We will address these questions in the context of the ConPaaS system running over an energy-efficient private cloud such as Snooze. We will follow a systems-oriented methodology based on rigorous experimental data collection, formulation of hypotheses about the necessary mechanisms, prototype implementations, and experimental (in-)validation of the hypotheses.

References:

1. ConPaaS: a Platform for Hosting Elastic Cloud Applications. Guillaume Pierre and Corina Stratan. IEEE Internet Computing 16(5), September-October 2012.
2. Energy Management in IaaS Clouds: A Holistic Approach. Eugen Feller, Cyril Rohr, David Margery, and Christine Morin. In Proceedings of the 5th IEEE International Conference on Cloud Computing (CLOUD), June 2012.

Required qualifications:

• A PhD in large-scale distributed systems, Cloud computing, green computing or high-performance computing.
• Excellent programming skills in Linux environments.
• Good communication and writing skills.
• Good command of English.
• Knowledge of the following technologies is not mandatory but will be considered as a plus:
• Python and shell scripting
• Commercial cloud systems: Amazon EC2 and EBS, Heroku, etc.
• Open-source cloud systems: OpenNebula, OpenStack.
• Revision control systems: GIT, svn.
• Linux distributions: Debian, Ubuntu.
• Note that knowledge of French is not required for this position.

Start date: As soon as possible. The position is offered for a period of 18 months.

Location: Rennes is the capital city of Britanny, in the western part of France. It is easy to reach thanks to the high-speed train line to Paris. Rennes is a lively city and a major center for higher education and research. The job will take place within the INRIA/IRISA research center, which is internationally recognized for its research in the domain of information and communication sciences. The postdoc will take place within the MYRIADS team which is involved in many research projects in the domain of cloud computing and energy efficiency: ConPaaS, Contrail, DALHIS, GreenTouch, HARNESS, Snooze, etc.

Applications: A first selection of candidates will take place on December 13th 2013. To maximize your chances of success, please send your application before this date. The position will however remain open until a suitable candidate is found. To apply, please send the following documents to Guillaume Pierre (guillaume.pierre@irisa.fr):

• CV.
• A motivation letter highlighting your previous research achievements in a domain close to cloud computing.
• Two recommendation letters.

Contact: for any information about this position please contact Guillaume Pierre (guillaume.pierre@irisa.fr) and/or Anne-Cécile Orgerie (anne-cecile.orgerie@inria.fr)

IRISA and the University of Rennes 1 (France) have an open position for an Engineer in the domain of cloud computing.

Note: this position is now filled.

Title: extending ConPaaS for heterogeneous clouds.

Description:

Cloud computing systems are currently composed of large numbers of relatively inexpensive computers, interconnected by standard IP routers and supported by stock disk drives. However, many demanding applications have now reached a fundamental limit in their ability to scale out using traditional machines. Future performance improvements will derive from the use of high-end specialized equipment in addition to standard hardware: GPUs of course, but also FPGAs, programmable routers, and advanced storage technologies. In this context the HARNESS European project investigates: (i) how cloud providers may offer such extremely heterogeneous hardware to its users; and (ii) how cloud customers may make use of these heterogeneous resources to run their applications such that they exhibit the best possible price-performance tradeoff.

We are planning to base the HARNESS application execution runtime on ConPaaS, an open-source runtime environment for hosting applications in the cloud. ConPaaS aims at offering the full power of the cloud to application developers while shielding them from the associated complexity of the cloud. It 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. It runs on a variety of public and private clouds, and it is currently the only PaaS system capable of executing applications across multiple clouds simultaneously.

ConPaaS was initially developed in the Contrail European project. It is now a mature and stable platform, with new features being added on a regular basis. ConPaaS developers are distributed across several teams in Europe (France, Netherlands, Germany, U.K., etc.).

We are now looking for a full-time engineer who will design and implement the necessary modifications to adapt ConPaaS to the requirements of HARNESS applications. This job includes the following tasks:

• Develop extensions to the current system. The planned extensions essentially consist in integrating ConPaaS with heterogeneous virtualized hardware resources such as FPGAs,  programmable routers, and advanced storage technologies. A number of structural changes in the ConPaaS architecture will also be necessary.
• Coordinate developments with those realized by our partners in Rennes and in other European universities.
• Participate in the ongoing software testing and documentation activities.
• Provide user support to ConPaaS users within the HARNESS consortium.
• Occasionally give presentations about ConPaaS and HARNESS at relevant technical conferences.

Required qualifications:

• A Master degree in computer science or a closely related field.
• Excellent knowledge of large-scale distributed systems and cloud computing.
• Provable programming skills in Linux environments.
• Good communication and writing skills.
• Good command of English.
• Knowledge of the following technologies is not mandatory but will be considered as a plus:
  • Python and shell scripting
  • Commercial cloud systems: Amazon EC2 and EBS, Heroku, etc.
  • Open-source cloud systems: OpenNebula, OpenStack.
  • Revision control systems: GIT, svn
  • Linux distributions: Debian, Ubuntu
  • Heterogeneous hardware (FPGAs, GPUs…)
• Note that knowledge of French is not required for this position.

Start date: as soon as possible. The position is offered for a period of one year. The contract may be extended further, depending on funding availability.

Location: Rennes is the capital city of Britanny, in the western part of France. It is easy to reach thanks to the high-speed train line to Paris. Rennes is a lively city and a major center for higher education and research. The job will take place within the INRIA/IRISA research center, which is internationally recognized for its research in the domain of information and communication sciences. The job will take place within the MYRIADS team which is involved in many research projects in the domain of cloud computing: ConPaaS, Contrail, DALHIS, GreenTouch, HARNESS, Snooze, etc.

Applications: A first selection of candidates will take place on  December 13th 2013. To maximize your chances of success, please send your application before this date. The position will however remain open until a suitable candidate is found. To apply, please send the following documents to Guillaume Pierre (guillaume.pierre@irisa.fr):

• CV
• Motivation letter highlighting your previous achievements in similar projects
• Two recommendation letters

Contact:  For any additional information please contact  Guillaume Pierre (guillaume.pierre@irisa.fr).

The ConPaaS team is proud to announce the release of ConPaaS-1.3.1. This release extends the previous versions and brings a number of important new features:

• Save and resume an application with manifests. Previous version already allowed to automatically deploy entire applications from manifests. Now one can snapshot a running application and dynamically create a manifest that can be used to restart the application.
• Persistent storage for the XtreemFS and MySQL services.
• New HTC service: this service provides a throughput-oriented scheduler for bags of tasks submitted on demand for ConPaaS.
• New modular script to create disk images for ConPaaS with size optimization.

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 overview 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!

For people who couldn’t attend the ConPaaS workshop, we have prepared videos of a selection of presentations. Enjoy!

The State Of the ConPaaS Union from contrail-project on Vimeo.

ConPaaS Architecture from contrail-project on Vimeo.

ConPaaS Service Development from contrail-project on Vimeo.

Virtual networking in ConPaaS from contrail-project on Vimeo.

ConPaaS: MySQL Galera Service from contrail-project on Vimeo.

ConPaaS – Latest news from the task farming service from contrail-project on Vimeo.

The ConPaaS team is proud to announce the release of ConPaaS-1.2.0. This release extends the previous versions and brings a number of important new features:

• Multi-cloud deployments: ConPaaS can now be deployed over several clouds simultaneously. The user can choose in which cloud each virtual machine gets deployed. This may be useful for example to deploy ConPaaS over multiple availability zones in Amazon EC2, or to integrate resources from a private cloud together with a public one.
• Virtual private network support: all communications between virtual machines belonging to the same application may now go through a multipoint virtual private network. This allows one to hide the network heterogeneity between machines located in different clouds, and to easily traverse firewalls. This feature exploits the IPOP technology.
• Automated deployment of entire applications: instead of deploying multiple related ConPaaS services one by one, ConPaaS users can now deploy entire applications in one click. All that is necessary is to write a simple “application manifest” which specifies the list of required services and their configuration. ConPaaS provides a few ready-made manifests for common applications.
• Performance monitoring: all ConPaaS services now have the ability to monitor their own performance using standard and service-specific metrics.

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 overview 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 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. 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.

Practical information:

• The workshop will take place in room F619 in the science building of the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam (6th floor, F wing, room 19). Direction information
• There is no registration fee.

Program:

• 9:30-10:00: Opening + the state of the ConPaaS union (Guillaume Pierre + Thilo Kielmann) [pdf]
• 10:00-11:00: ConPaaS architecture (Emanuele Rocca) [pdf]
• 11:00-11:30: break
• 11:30-12:00: Latest news from the Task Farming service (Thilo Kielmann) [pdf]
• 12:00-12:30: Experience report from a happy ConPaaS user (Kaveh Razavi) [pdf]
• 12:30-13:30: lunch
• 13:30-14:00: ConPaaS service development tutorial (Emanuele Rocca) [pdf]
• 14:00-14:30: Latest news from the MYSQL services (Ales Cernivec) [pptx | pdf]
• 14:30-15:00: Virtual networking in ConPaaS (Renato Figueiredo) [pptx | pdf]
• 15:00-15:30: break
• 15:30-16:00: The scalarix service and its resource provisioning mechanisms (Thorsten Schütt) [pptx | pdf]
• 16:00-16:30: Dynamic resource provisioning for the PHP service (Hector Fernandez) [pdf]
• 16:30-17:00: Planned extensions for the Harness, MC-data and COMMIT/ projects (Guillaume Pierre + Thilo Kielmann) [pdf]
• 17:00-17:30: Closing

The ConPaaS workshop is organized by the Contrail, Harness and MC-DATA projects.

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.