Section: New Software and Platforms
VEP
Keywords: Cloud - Security - Computing - IaaS - Standards - OVF - CIMI - SLA
Scientific Description
Virtual Execution Platform (VEP) is a Contrail service that sits just above IaaS layer at the service provider end of the Contrail cloud federation. The VEP service provides a uniform interface for managing the whole lifecycle of elastic applications on the cloud and hides the details of the IaaS layer to the user. VEP applications are described in OVF (Open Virtualization Format) standard format. Resource usage is controlled by CEE (Constrained Execution Environment) rules which can be derived from SLAs (Service Level Agreement). The VEP service integrates a monitoring system where the major events about the application, mainly resource usage, are made available to the user.
The VEP service provides a RESTful interface and can be exploited directly by users on top of the provider IaaS. OpenNebula and OpenStack IaaS frameworks were initially supported. During the VEP-S EIT ICT Labs activity in 2014, VEP was extended with a new OCCI IaaS driver which allows to control any IaaS framework providing a standard OCCI API. Support for the new OCCI SLA proposition from OGF has also been added and allows to represent the VEP CEEs in a standard format. Finally, during this activity, the Zabbix open source distributed monitoring system was integrated to VEP.
Functional Description VEP is a management tool for IaaS clouds with a REST interface and simple GUI for administrator. It is an extensible and reusable software for easy deployment of distributed applications. It provides advance reservation, pro-active fault tolerance. It is SLA aware and manages elasticity.