FG-314

Project Details

Project Lead

Massimo Canonico 

Project Manager

Massimo Canonico 

Project Members

Andrea Lombardo, Andrea Mastroberardino, Irene Lovotti, Gabriele Barberis, Davide Monfrecola, Fabrizio Cannonero  

Supporting Experts

Gregor von Laszewski, Barbara Ann O'Leary  

Institution

University of Piemonte Orientale, Computer Science Department  

Discipline

Computer Science (401) 

Subdiscipline

11.01 Computer and Information Sciences, General 

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.

Scale of Use

Few VMs to test our tools.

Results

CloudTUI: A multi cloud platform Text User Interface
Author: Irene Lovotti
Institute: Department of Science and Innovation Technology (DiSIT) - University of Piemonte Orientale - ITALY
Supervisor: Massimo Canonico
Contact info: massimo.canonico@unipmn.it

CloudTUI is a Text-User-Interface that helps cloud users to manage three of the most famous cloud platforms: Eucalyptus, Nimbus and OpenStack. With CloudTUI you can easily create/delete/monitor instances and volumes.

We tried to make it as simple as possible: in order to use CloudTUI you just have to unpack the cloudTUI.tgz file and run "python cloudTUI.py".

The source code is available here, while screenshots are available here and, finally, a demo video is here.

video of cloudTUI:

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CloudTUI-advanced (BETA)
Author: Andrea Lombardo
Institute: Department of Science and Innovation Technology (DiSIT) -
                 University of Piemonte Orientale - ITALY
Superadvisor: Massimo Canonico
Contact info: massimo.canonico@unipmn.it

CloudTUI-advanced is a tool that helps cloud users to manage workspaces in Nimbus. With this tool the user can easily
create/delete/monitor his workspaces and moreover, iti is possible to specify policy in order to decide when scale-up/scale-down the system. More details in "Scale-up and scale-down" paragraph. CloudTUI-advanced is written in python and uses boto libraries.

The source code is available here, while screenshots are availble here and, finally, a short demo video is here.

Please note that CloudTUI-advance is still in beta version. Some of the features could not work properly. We are working right now on fixing all bugs. Of course, we would be happy if you give a try to your software out and let us know what you think.

video of cloudTUI-advance: