[Fiware-cloud] FI-Core Cloud Chapter Refocus Plan

[Alex Glikson]

Dear partners,

Please, find below an overview of the changes we are introducing in the 
Cloud chapter, to be included in the consortium's response to recent 
project review report.
I don't think it includes anything completely new to anyone, but hopefully 
it gives a more holistic/coherent view on the changes being made 
(essentially, since the beginning of the project).
Your comments are welcome.

Thanks,
Alex

---
As part of the ongoing reassessment of priorities conducted in the Cloud 
chapter since the beginning of the project, the following changes are 
being implemented:
It was decided to stop the development of Cross-Region Enablement GE. 
Although it was originally included in the Description of Work (as a new 
GE), after reassessment performed during the project kick-off we 
identified overlaps with activities in the FIWARE Ops chapter, and hence 
decided not to proceed with the development of this new GE.
Given the high priority of increasing the maturity and the sustainability 
of the Cloud GEs (primarily targeting the FIWARE Lab, but also future 
commercial deployments), it was decided to dedicate significant effort to 
further alignment with the OpenStack community and ecosystem, as follows:
Stop developing enhancements to basic IaaS services which are already 
mature enough, in particular this refers to the DCRM GE (OpenStack 
Compute, Storage, Networking and Image services). Some of the proprietary 
enhancements developed in FI-WARE has been already contributed to the 
community, while some others will be contributed outside of FI-Core.
Stop further development of GEs not based on OpenStack. Put emphasis on 
contribution of assets developed in FI-WARE/FI-Core till now to OpenStack 
projects.  In particular, we contribute assets developed as part of PaaS 
GE and SDC GE to OpenStack Murano, and contribute assets developed in 
Monitoring GE and in Policy Manager GE to OpenStack Ceilometer and 
OpenStack Congress respectively. All the corresponding FIWARE GEs will 
undergo transition to become fully aligned (and compatible) with 
OpenStack, and the old specifications and reference implementations will 
be deprecated.
Give the high demand for Object Storage GE capabilities among the 
developers in the FIWARE ecosystem (e.g., it is among top-5 GEs in a 
recent survey conducted with A16 accelerator projects), we will increase 
the effort aimed at accelerating its maturity and readiness for wide 
adoption (focusing both on the needs of developers using the GE, as well 
as operators who need to deploy and operate it). In particular, we are 
taking the following actions:
Accelerate adoption of developer-facing capabilities (such as storlets), 
leveraging results of past FP7 projects (e.g., Active Media Store 
developed in VISION Cloud project)
Enable better integration with other GEs, thus increasing its "FIWAREness" 
(in particular Big Data Analytics)
Improve readiness for adoption by operators by improving resiliency and 
cost-efficiency
Facilitate sustainability of the Object Storage GE by contributions to 
OpenStack and other related communities (e.g., Spark)
In support for the strategic decision to adopt Docker as the standard 
application delivery mechanism in FIWARE, we introduce Docker GE, 
providing cutting edge application hosting capabilities with Docker 
containers. Docker is the new de-facto standard for packaging, running and 
managing modern cloud applications, allowing to radically improve the 
developer experience (portability, lightweight runtime, DevOps 
enablement). While Docker is developed by a rapidly growing open source 
community and is triggering creation of its own commercial ecosystem, the 
technology itself is not fully mature yet. In order to accelerate its 
maturity and readiness for production use in FIWARE, we are investing 
effort to address requirements targeting commercial FIWARE providers who 
would need to efficiently operate large-scale multi-tenant Docker-based 
environments. In parallel, we are providing a simplified solution that can 
be used by developers already, on existing FIWARE Lab infrastructure 
(leveraging assets from FI-Content 2 project).
We believe that the combination of above actions keeps FIWARE Cloud 
activities on the right path balancing between the different (and 
evolving) needs of the project. Moreover, we will continue monitoring the 
situation (both inside and outside), and will continue adapting in an 
agile fashion, applying the necessary adjustments going forward.

====================================================================================
Alex Glikson
Manager, Cloud Infrastructure Solutions, IBM Haifa Research Lab; FIWARE 
Cloud Leader & Architect
Email: glikson at il.ibm.com | Phone: +972-4-8281085 | Mobile: 
+972-54-6466667 | Fax: +972-4-8296112

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