An Extensible Software-as-a-Service Solution for Distributed Infrastructures
Journal Title: Scalable Computing: Practice and Experience - Year 2016, Vol 17, Issue 2
Abstract
Distributed research infrastructures embrace resources, services, and users. From those, services display the highest churn rate. The reasons are twofold. First, new versions or new services emerge, gain popularity, and have to be provisioned by infrastructure operators. Secondly, the demand to make research reproducible inclines the users to share the software they used to obtain their results. Coming to grips with these high churn rates is not easy, but has the potential to speed-up scientific discovery. In this paper we will describe an extensible Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) solution conceived to facilitate seamless exchange, evolution, and deployment of software services in distributed environments. In opposite to ordinary SaaS solutions, the portfolio of the software services in our approach is extensible. We implemented means for users and developers to make their services readily available in the distributed infrastructure with minimal overhead. In this process, not only the actual software is made available but also the knowledge of how to install and configure it is conveyed, thus running instances of the new service can be provided right away. We will share the experience gained during the implementation of the extensible SaaS solution for DARIAH-DE research infrastructure. It was used to provision on-demand instances of software used in digital humanities. Subsequently, the same solution was reused in a completely different context to provide on-demand instances of UNICORE Grid middleware for training and testing purposes. The operation of our extensible SaaS, yielded additional requirements and extensions. In particular, the need for monitoring and measuring the resource usage were identified and addressed. The presented insights can help to address the problem of exchange and provision of scientific software. Other distributed infrastructures can incorporate them to improve the scalability, maintainability, user-friendliness, and sustainability of their platforms.
Authors and Affiliations
JEDRZEJ RYBICKI, BENEDIKT VON ST. VIETH
Keywords
Related Articles
- EP ID EP203660
- DOI 10.12694/scpe.v17i2.1158
- Views 14
- Downloads 0
Enabling Scalable Data Processing and Management through Standards-based Job Execution and the Global Federated File System
Emerging challenges for scientific communities are to efficiently process big data obtained by experimentation and computational simulations. Supercomputing architectures are available to support scalable and high perfor...
Enhanced Data Security for Public Cloud Environment with Secured Hybrid Encryption Authentication Mechanisms
Cloud computing is an evolving computing technology that provides many services such as software and storage. With the introduction of cloud storage, the security of outsourced data has become a major issue in cloud comp...
Improvement Strategies for Device Interoperability Middleware using Formal Reliability Analysis
Ensuring the correctness of middleware that ensures interoperability of various medical devices is one of the biggest challenges in the e-health domain. Traditionally, these Device Interoperability Middleware (DIM) are a...
Impact of Single Parameter Changes on Ceph Cloud Storage Performance
In a general purpose cloud system efficiencies are yet to be had from supporting diverse applications and their requirements within a storage system used for a private cloud. Supporting such diverse requirements poses a...
Communication-aware Approaches for Transparent Checkpointing in Cloud Computing
Checkpoint/Restart or checkpointing is a fault tolerance technique which consists on taking frequent snapshots of an application, so that, in the event of a failure, the application's state can be restored and the applic...