Project COLA is coming to an end and presents MiCADO – the multi-cloud orchestration and auto-scaling framework

After 33 months of collaboration, travelling through Europe and developing MiCADO, Project COLA is coming to its end and is presenting the MiCADO framework.

September 2019 – In the past decades, requirements of software systems have changed significantly. Scalability, automation and sustainability now strongly influence the profitability of companies. The foundation for this change is the elasticity of Cloud technologies that supports designing practical solutions in order to scale and automate processes, networks or cloud-native applications according to the changing needs or demands of users. Cloud-native applications are structured as microservices where multiple single services are packaged in containers. Services, such as databases, cloud orchestrators and file storage solutions are deployed as microservices and managed on an elastic cloud infrastructure.

The range of solutions on the market supporting microservices and scalability is merely enormous (most well-known tools include Docker Swarm, Rancher & Kubernetes). However, such solutions require specific expertise when developing secure and scalable application clusters and infrastructures and are also limited regarding their scalability policies. Since January 2017, funded with a grant value of EUR 3,535,000, the European Innovation Action COLA developed MiCADO, a modular multi-cloud framework to automate application deployment and optimise and auto-scale application clusters at run-time both at virtual machine and Kubernetes deployment levels.

MiCADO framework

MiCADO Master is deployed on a virtual machine via an Ansible playbook, configured as the Kubernetes Master Node and has installed:

  • the Docker Engine,
  • Occopus to scale VMs,
  • Prometheus for monitoring,
  • the COLA Policy Keeper to act on scaling decisions and
  • the COLA Submitter to provide a submission endpoint.

The MiCADO Master Node supports the operation, management and monitoring of applications based on specific parameters such CPU or network traffic, detecting bottlenecks, and realising the autoscaling control loops. The desired deployment and run-time characteristics of the application are defined in a TOSCA-based Application Description Template (ADT) that provides all relevant information, application requirements, infrastructure characteristics and scaling policies to roll out the Infrastructure and manage the application cluster. Additionally, scaling decision can be further improved with a machine learning based optimiser.

MiCADO’s Industrial Demonstrators

To prove and demonstrate MiCADO’s applicability for industry-scale problems, three near production quality demonstrators and 24 further proof of concepts were implemented during the project’s lifetime. The three large MiCADO demonstrators and a commercial trial are briefly described below.

Time is up for COLA

After 33 months of collaboration, travelling through Europe and developing MiCADO, Project COLA is coming to its end. However, MiCADO will not disappear. The software will be further developed the University of Westminster and MTA SZTAKI and the official distribution partner of MiCADO is cloudSME also providing consulting & development services for companies that want to utilise or extend MiCADO functionalities for the deployment and management of their applications.

The COLA Project received funding from the European Commission’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under grant agreement No 731574. The project website will be maintained for the coming years, presenting information and updates on COLA and MiCADO.

European Innovation Action is looking for support in Beta test

December 2018 – After almost two years the COLA project published its software product, the MiCADOscale 0.6.1.that is ready to be tested! The development team of MiCADOscale is looking for your support  – Download and test MiCADOscale 0.6.1, share your opinion and give your feedback in our survey!

About MiCADOscale

In today’s computing environment when there is a shift from capital expenditures to operational ones, it is essential to achieve good performance, an automatically scalable resource framework, sensitive to the demand of the applications as well as for the allocated resources, is required. The European open source MiCADOscale framework manages and monitors the orchestration at the application level and scales virtual machines and Docker containers based on the resources required to meet operator-defined policies.

MiCADOscale features:

  • Automated scaling at the level of application
  • Integrated, secure dashboard with various monitoring options
  • Multiple cloud support (EC2, OpenStack, CloudSigma, Cloudbroker…)
  • Secure distributed system (by Zorp™ Gateway*)
  • Highly customizable scaling policies (can be defined specifically for requirements of the application)

By combining all above-mentioned features, MiCADOscale provides the opportunity to manage and monitor application execution and having efficient resource-consumption without bottlenecks or underutilized resources. Ansible playbook ensures a seamless and fast deployment and configuration of MiCADOscale.

MiCADOscale wants you: If you are…

  • using large and expensive resources in the Cloud to support fluctuations in user demand or
  • renting a large number of instances to be sure that you finish your tasks by a certain deadline

…you can leave it all to MiCADOscale. MiCADOscale will monitor the resource usage of your application and will automatically scale up or down your resources as required.

COLA project and MiCADOscale

Project COLA (Cloud Orchestration at the Level of Application), is an Innovation Action of the European Commission under grant agreement no. 731574 and runs from January 2017 until June 2019. The main objective is to develop MiCADOscale as a generic pluggable framework that supports optimal and secure deployment as well as the run-time orchestration of cloud applications. The core-development team of MiCADOscale is composed of researchers from the University of Westminster in the UK and MTA SZTAKI research institute from Hungary (COLA project partners). The product is developed as an open-source framework with the aim to support the further uptake and spread of cloud computing services in the industry and the public sector, its technology, and the benefits brought along.

HANNOVER MESSE 2017 (24-28 April)

February 2017 – The European research project COLA (application-level cloud orchestration) is developing a flexible and secure software architecture based on open-source approaches to make cloud services scalable and secure across multiple cloud platforms. COLA will showcase how cloud technology can be used in areas such as emergency evacuation, technical simulation, modelling, and public data analysis. The simulations make optimization potential visible and give the users of the technology a decisive competitive advantage.

COLA’s target audience are application developers working in the public and industrial sectors who value scalability and resource efficiency. Cloud infrastructures provide a high degree of flexibility, but they can not be automatically scaled. Application developers are forced to program custom code for each application to ensure automatic scalability of applications. COLA’s goal is to develop a generic open-source tool that enhances security in the cloud and enables scalability of applications. MiCADO services enable the dynamic and automatic scaling of resources for almost any cloud application. MiCADO’s well-defined interfaces allow for easy integration with existing applications without affecting the original application logic. MiCADO provides full user control and quality standards and scales the application resources up or down as needed to ensure resource-efficient and optimal application execution. The competitiveness of application developers and users is greatly maximized by MiCADO.

cloudSME is the core partner of COLA and responsible for project communication. The European startup, founded in 2016 in Duisburg, has become a European centre of competence for cloud-based HPC simulations and has developed a European multi-cloud platform linked to high-performance data centres across Europe. The cloudSME simulation platform can be used for both small and large simulations and simplifies the application of custom simulation applications, SaaS (software as a service), to enterprises and institutions. Besides, the cloudSME simulation platform supports providers of simulation software and consulting agencies who have access to PaaS (platform-as-a-service) and can deploy their software to their customers on the cloudSME simulation platform. cloudSME will be represented at HANNOVER MESSE 2017 from 24-28 April in Hall 3, Stand 3, along with COLA and other European projects.

Cloud experts from all over Europe met for COLA

Duisburg, January 2017 – The kickoff meeting of the COLA (Cloud Orchestration at the Level of Application) project, by invitation from the project coordinator Dr. Tamas Kiss of the University of Westminster, took place from the 25th to 27th January in London, UK.  30 representatives of 11 SMEs and 3 universities, from all over Europe, came together to present and discuss work-packages as well as the project’s objectives and future direction.

The main objective of COLA is to provide a reference implementation of a generic and pluggable framework that supports the optimal and secure deployment and run-time orchestration of cloud applications. Cloud-based services emerge rapidly.  Additional value for small and medium sized enterprises (SMEs) as well as for public sector organizations is also on the increase. Nowadays, SMEs can have access to SaaS (Software-as-a-Service) on demand, instead of investing heavily into hardware and software with additional maintenance costs, that meets their needs effectively and cost efficiently. On the one hand cloud computing is affordable but on the other, due to the limited flexibility at the level of applications and security concerns, the demand for SaaS is only moderately increasing.

COLA aims to significantly improve the take-up of cloud computing services by increasing resource scalability of applications and enabling their efficient resource utilization. The aim is to serve a variable range of customer needs and enable suitably optimized resource consumption combined with cost efficient resource management.  The COLA technology will be demonstrated by several use-cases, for example modelling large scale evacuation scenarios, and social and open data analysis to develop as well as improve public services.

The COLA project was launched in January 2017 and will run until June 2019. COLA is an Innovation Action [project ID: 731574] initiated and supported by the European Commission’s HORIZON 2020 Programme. The next COLA meeting will take place in Cracow, Poland, in September 2017.