BonFIRE: Lighting the path to the future of cloud computing

Now we revisit BonFIRE in the light of new developments as the project moves towards maturity and continuity.

“Look inside the black box”:
Today there is a wide choice of cloud computing services, at all levels from Infrastructure-as-a-Service up, and many competing infrastructures, hypervisors, and operating systems. But BonFIRE (“Building service testbeds for Future Internet Research and Experimentation”) is different; built exclusively for testing and experimentation, BonFIRE gives you total control and, if desired, dedicated access to the specific physical machines on which your experiment will run. BonFIRE allows you to develop your ideas in different scenarios in a way that is like the real world, but better, because it allows you to observe in detail what happens in complex situations which you control. Network events, resource contention, elasticity, data storage – on BonFIRE you can investigate the interplay of all of these key cloud computing dimensions, using a simple web-based portal.

As it prepares for post-project sustainability, to continue to support ground-breaking innovation in cloud computing, BonFIRE has focussed its architecture to rest on four pillars: observability; control; advanced features; and ease of use. Unlike generic cloud services, BonFIRE allows you to investigate in many configurations. For a company with a close-to-market product, or for a researcher at the cutting edge of computer science, testing on a variety of platforms is often essential. Geographically spread over six main sites around Europe, the BonFIRE offers experimentation on OpenNebula, Virtual Wall emulated network, and HP Cells infrastructure. An experimenter can choose from a number of preconfigured instance types (currently, VM images are based on Debian Squeeze), or configure bespoke CPU, RAM, and disk storage capacity. BonFIRE also has connectors to other cloud computing services, enabling developers to deploy experiments using the Amazon Web Services EC2 interface and, soon, on VMware-based services.

BonFIRE provides monitoring using the Zabbix open source software – or you can use your own preferred monitoring. BonFIRE can provide details not only of the virtual resources, but also of the physical hosts (for OpenNebula) that the virtual resources are deployed on. What is more, BonFIRE allows you to track events in an experiment even while it is running. For example, you might want to start some custom shutdown procedure automatically once your experiment transitions to a “stopped” state before the experiment fully ends.

These advanced facilities have been designed with ease of use as a priority, with a choice of interfaces to suit different needs. For many users, the BonFIRE portal will provide a very easy, familiar interface. For more advanced features, a Ruby-based client library and command-line interface tools are available. These tools are powerful front-ends to enable researchers to concentrate on their research, while BonFIRE handles the underlying details transparently on their behalf.

Already, BonFIRE has proved invaluable for two SMEs who needed to understand how to ensure a smoother user experience with Desktop-as-a-Service, using virtual path slices to create a right of way across the internet without interference. Solutions to real business needs currently being investigated with the help of BonFIRE include automatic elastic scaling in a large and “bursty” anti-plagiarism application, and the provision of high-reliability home monitoring services which also have very large data flows for video and other real-time data.

What is new in BonFIRE?
BonFIRE is now entering its mature stage, but before then still has some exciting new features that have recently become available or are soon to be introduced in the forthcoming release.

Open Access
In our last report on BonFIRE, we briefly mentioned Open Access, which allows users to apply for free-to-use access to the BonFIRE facilities using a very simple application process. Open Access is now operational and the first experiments are up and running.
Open Access builds on the success of two funded open calls, and it is particularly encouraging that an experiment from one of these calls, run by Manchester Business School, has led to further research through Open Access.

Open Access gives European SMEs and researchers the opportunity to expand into the multi-billion euro € market for innovative cloud computing services, without having to invest in expensive capital infrastructure, an option which is usually only realistic for large corporations. Feedback from users is already extremely positive.

CoCoMa: controllable contentious events
BonFIRE allows you to control and observe experiments at different levels. But in the real world, there are often external workloads that are not wanted; this could be unexpectedly high levels of contention, network or hardware faults, or even malicious activity. Cloud computing is a shared environment, so it is essential to be confident that a service will work well under these conditions - which underscores the importance of testing in practice how such events will impact the system.

CoCoMa, soon to be available in the next release, is BonFIRE’s Controlled Contentious and Malicious Framework, allowing an experimenter to create and monitor these kinds of conditions, in a way which is totally under their control, enabling them to investigate and analyse different scenarios. CoCoMa deliberately makes the platform “misbehave” by generating workloads which emulate heavy use of CPU, disk reads and writes, RAM memory, and network throughput, as well as hardware faults or attacks.

These are realistic conditions of the kind that will be encountered by applications in the real world; but because they are controlled, they are also repeatable, ensuring reliability and rigour in the results, and enabling planned testing of different parameters of the system under test.
Deploy on different kinds of Cloud
Also launching as part the next release, BonFIRE welcomes Spanish service provider Wellness Telecom (http://en.wtelecom.es/) as the first commercial company to add BonFIRE experimentation to an established product range. Selected from six very strong applicants in an open call in Q3 2012, Wellness brings a different perspective to the BonFIRE consortium. In addition, Wellness will add to BonFIRE’s portfolio of testing platforms, because, like many commercially-available public cloud services, the company operates VMware with the vCloudTM director and the vSphereTM ESXi hypervisor, complementing the OpenNebula, HP Cells, and iMinds Virtual Wall environments of BonFIRE partners and the connection to Amazon EC2 already available. These environments can all be accessed through interfaces which are familiar to BonFIRE users, thanks to the underlying Open Cloud Computing Interface (OCCI), the standard protocol for cloud computing management tasks – without any need for the user to know anything about OCCI.

BonFIRE into the Future
Looking to the future, from the end of 2013, BonFIRE will no longer receive direct European funding, but has built up a strong user base through competitively tendered open calls and through Open Access. BonFIRE is shortly to increase resources at key sites and is playing a major part in two flagship European projects: Fed4FIRE and ECO2Clouds. Sustaining the momentum once funding ends is a challenge for all funded projects, but BonFIRE is ahead of the curve in preparing for the next phase of its lifecycle. This is positive, but, too often, research projects fail to make the most of excellent ideas and valuable features and to carry them forward as funding comes to an end.

Between them, Fed4FIRE and ECO2Clouds cover the central issues in the future of the Internet. Fed4FIRE, running for four years from October 2012, provides a unique space for research that breaks the boundaries: wireless, software-defined networking, cloud computing, smart cities, and the Internet of Services. Meanwhile, the 24-month ECO2Clouds clouds project links pure cloud computing research with strategies to reduce energy consumption and CO2 emissions.

This will be a different shape to BonFIRE, with infrastructure from a subset of the current partners. With world-leading experience in computing innovation, EPCC in Edinburgh, Scotland and INRIA in Rennes, France continue in both of these ongoing projects while iMinds, operators of the Virtual Wall in Ghent, Belgium, takes forward BonFIRE’s unique ability to support innovation at the intersection of cloud and networking, as the leader of Fed4FIRE.