FSToolkit

FSToolkit: a Toolkit enabling the specification and operation of Federaration Scenarios

“Federation is the act of combining data or identities across multiple systems. Federation can be done by a cloud provider or by a cloud broker. A broker has no cloud resources of its own, but matches consumers and providers based on the SLA required by the consumer. The consumer has no knowledge that the broker does not control the resources.” – Cloud computing community
Federated infrastructures in experimentally driven research need models, architectures and tools to address the definition and execution/operation/control of the experiment. In our work «Federation Computing: A pragmatic approach for the Future Internet» , we presented a paradigm called Federation Computing where it deals with the aspects of defining and operating/controlling experiment scenarios or so called Federation Scenarios in the context of the Panlabproject.  A Federation Scenario is a well-defined specification of (heterogeneous) services or resources and their configurations, offered by a diverse pool of organizations in order to form richer infrastructures for experimentally driven research. A Federation Scenario is an equivalent of a requested SLA which is required by the end-user, the customer of the federation. These federation scenarios represent customer needs such as:
  1. evaluation and testing specifications of new technologies, products, services
  2. execution of network and application layer experiments
  3. or even complete commercial applications that are executed by the federation’s infrastructure in a cost-effective way

Federations of Resource Providers and Brokers

A Federation Scenario describes end-user needs for services provided by resources of a federated infrastructure. At this point resource brokers play a key-role in creating and supporting federated infrastructures. A resource broker matches customer requested services and provider resources from the federation.

The FSToolkit is a development environment for specifying and operating Federation Scenarions. The editor is based on the textual modeling framework (TMF) of Eclipse and specifically the Xtext framework , which helps implementing rich editors by a definition of a specific syntax. The toolkit supports a family of Domain Specific Languages (DSLs), used by resource brokers, resource providers and experimenters, that have a defined meta-model as an abstract syntax. The meta-model is also capable to support a federation of federations. This means that the model and therefore the DSLs are capable to describe federation scenarios involving resources even from a pool of resource brokers. The presented support language tooling is available for the Eclipse workbench.

An overview of the FSToolkit

For more information please check our project wiki.