User-friendly tools to play with cloud platforms

Project Information

Discipline
Computer Science (401) 
Subdiscipline
11.01 Computer and Information Sciences, General 
Orientation
Research 
Abstract

Most of the cloud computing platforms just provide a command-line user interface in order to interact with Virtual Machines (VM). From our point of view, these user interfaces are not user-friendly for different reasons. For example, the parameters necessary to start/stop a VM:

  • are not always intuitive
  • are significantly different among cloud platforms even when the task to perform is the same (i.e. start a VM)
  • require to use/remember IDs such as instance-id, image-id, volume-id instead of menmonic names
To cope with the above issues, we plan to implement tools that provide a very simple command-line interface in order to ease the user interaction with cloud platforms.

Intellectual Merit

These tools will be used in educational activities.

Broader Impacts

All software will be available as "open source" code.

Project Contact

Project Lead
Massimo Canonico (mcanonic) 
Project Manager
Massimo Canonico (mcanonic) 
Project Members
Andrea Lombardo, Andrea Mastroberardino, Irene Lovotti, Gabriele Barberis, Davide Monfrecola, Fabrizio Cannonero  

Resource Requirements

Hardware System
  • I don't care (what I really need is a software environment and I don't care where it runs)
 
Use of FutureGrid

FutureGrid is the best testbed for our tools in order to test them in different cloud platforms.

Scale of Use

Few VMs to test our tools.

Project Timeline

Submitted
03/06/2013 - 10:04 
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