How would you present the project?
Cloud computing has become the most popular paradigm for delivering on-demand computing resources and business applications. However, customers are facing four major barriers: heterogeneity of cloud offers (which cloud to select?), lack of interoperability between cloud (how to compose them?), lack of portability of cloud applications across clouds (how to avoid the vendor lock-in syndrome?), and lack of a unified multi-cloud management approach.
OCCIware project aims to break up these barriers and simplify development processes, in a standard way, by providing a tool chain to design, develop, deploy and monitor everything as a service. Model driven development and formal approach are in the core part of the project.
What is your role in the project?
I’m working on the « model@runtime » component, The main tasks I’ve been in charge of since I am in the project include the development of a I multi-cloud studio and the maintenance of the docker studio product. I am concentrating now on developing runtime connectors for Scalair partner’s use cases (VMware and monitoring) . I am also evaluating the technology on other OCCIware use cases, and providing partner support for the overall tool chain (studios, runtimes and connectors).
What key innovation do you bring or help to develop?
Our OCCIware platform provides a unique software environment allowing to transparently manage multi-cloud.
The studio allows to design multi-cloud architecture diagram in minutes with a visual designer, featuring the main cloud providers of the market.
The Runtime part allows to :
- deploy the designed multi-cloud architecture in a secure way,
- connect and monitor the architecture in live, and provide data including status, health, load and many other informations.
I contributed to the development and maintenance of the model@runtime server in java. I faced many challenges, the hardest one beeing the MDD approach, which introduced a perpective I was ignoring at the beginning of the project (e.g. how to design and how to implement).
About Christophe Gourdin
Christophe has 16 years of experience in software engineering and the last 6 years in cloud computing management software (see Christophe's linkedin profile)
His current position is research and development engineer at Inria, the French National Institute for computer science and applied mathematics. The institute promotes “scientific excellence for technology transfer and society”.
Christophe's main domain is cloud computing management software written in java. He is part of Spirals Team. Spirals is conducting research activities in the domains of distributed systems and software engineering, in particular on self-healing, self-optimization and automatic software repair. Spirals is a joint project-team between Inria and the University of Lille – Sciences and Technologies within UMR 9189 CRIStAL.