NebulOus will accomplish substantial research contributions in the realms of cloud and fog computing brokerage by introducing advanced methods and tools for enabling secure and optimal application provisioning and reconfiguration over the cloud computing continuum. NebulOus will develop a novel Meta Operating System and platform for enabling transient fog brokerage ecosystems that seamlessly exploit edge and fog nodes, in conjunction with multi-cloud resources, to cope with the requirements posed by low latency applications. The envisaged BRONCO solution includes the following main directions of work: i. Development of appropriate modelling methods and tools for describing the cloud computing continuum, application requirements, and data streams; these methods and tools will be used for assuring the QoS of the provisioned brokered services. ii. Efficient comparison of available offerings, using appropriate multi-criteria decision-making methods that are able to consider all dimensions of consumer requirements. iii. Intelligent applications, workflows and data streams management in the cloud computing continuum. iv. Addressing in a unified manner the security aspects emerging in of transient cloud computing continuums (e.g., access control, secure network overlay etc.). v. Conducting and monitoring smart contracts-based service level agreements.

PrEstoCloud project will make substantial research contributions in the cloud computing and real-time data intensive applications domains, in order to provide a dynamic, distributed, self-adaptive and proactively configurable architecture for processing Big Data streams. In particular, PrEstoCloud aims to combine real-time Big Data, mobile processing and cloud computing research in a unique way that entails proactiveness of cloud resources use and extension of the fog computing paradigm to the extreme edge of the network. The envisioned PrEstoCloud solution is driven by the microservices paradigm and has been structured across five different conceptual layers: i) Meta-management; ii) Control; iii) Cloud infrastructure; iv) Cloud/Edge communication and v) Devices, layers. This innovative solution will address the challenge of cloud-based self-adaptive real-time Big Data processing, including mobile stream processing and will be demonstrated and assessed in several challenging, complementary and commercially-promising pilots. There will be three PrEstoCloud pilots from the logistics, mobile journalism and security surveillance, application domains. The objective is to validate the PrEstoCloud solution, prove that it is domain agnostic and demonstrate its added-value for attracting early adopters, thus initialising the exploitation process early on.

Release early, release often. Such is the mantra of IT giants like Twitter or Netflix. Pioneers in the engineering of applications that run in the cloud now routinely perform hundreds of code updates per day in what has become a thrust of continuous delivery around the clock. This stunning agility is a decisive competitive edge. It cuts time-to-market and hikes revenue. Behind the feat lies DevOps. This powerful development methodology brings high degrees of automation at all steps of construction and deployment. DevOps has gained more traction in the USA than in Europe and concern is raised that European companies may be “missing the train”. Their disinclination is thought to reflect a different cultural attitude toward risk. Indeed, a hasty deployment may propagate a regression bug into production due to lack of sufficient testing. Fear of breaking things is all the more justified as testing in DevOps mostly relies on manual effort. Leveraging advanced research in automatic test generation, STAMP aims at pushing automation in DevOps one step further through innovative methods of test amplification. It will reuse existing assets (test cases, API descriptions, dependency models), in order to generate more test cases and test configurations each time the application is updated. Acting at all steps of development cycle, it will bring amplification services at unit level, configuration level and production stage. STAMP will raise confidence and foster adoption of DevOps by the European IT industry. The project gathers 3 academic partners with strong software testing expertise, 5 software companies (in: e-Health, Content Management, Smart Cities and Public Administration), and an open source consortium. This industry-near research addresses concrete, business-oriented objectives. All solutions are open source and developed as microservices to facilitate exploitation, with a target at TRL 6.

MORPHEMIC proposes a unique way of adapting and optimizing Cloud computing applications by introducing the novel concepts of polymorph architecture and proactive adaptation. The former is when a component can run in different technical forms, i.e. in a Virtual Machine (VM), in a container, as a big data job, or as serverless components, etc. The technical form of deployment is chosen during the optimization process to fulfil the user’s requirements and needs. The quality of the deployment is measured by a user defined and application specific utility. Depending on the application’s requirements and its current workload, its components could be deployed in various forms in different environments to maximize the utility of the application deployment and the satisfaction of the user. Proactive adaptation is not only based on the current execution context and conditions but aims to forecast future resource needs and possible deployment configurations. This ensures that adaptation can be done effectively and seamlessly for the users of the application. The MORPHEMIC deployment platform will therefore be very beneficial for heterogeneous deployment in distributed environments combining various Cloud levels including Cloud data centres, edge Clouds, 5G base stations, and fog devices. Advanced forecasting methods, including the ES-Hybrid method recently winning the M4 forecasting competition, will be used to achieve the most accurate predictions. The outcome of the project will be implemented in the form of the complete solution, starting from modelling, through profiling, optimization, runtime reconfiguration and monitoring. Then the MORPHEMIC implementation will be integrated as a pre-processor for the existing MELODIC platform extending its deployment and adaptation capabilities beyond the multi-cloud and cross-cloud to the edge, 5G, and fog. This approach allows for a path to early demonstrations and commercial exploitation of the project results.