Federation Computing Interface (FCI): An API for accessing resources of the federation: In many testing scenarios there is a need to configure resources or even get monitoring status data properly after the VCT is provisioned while the testing is in progress. What is critical with the operational part of a VCT is the proper and valid run-time configuration of the participating resources.
The reason is that, while the VCT is operated by the federation’s customer, the federation must ensure all terms of the requested SLA of the VCT are fulfilled and nothing is violated or falls out of the scope of the SLA. To this end, the SLA must be constantly audited (or monitored) for different parameters (i.e. metering, service quality, security, etc). Federation Computing Interface (FCI) is an API for accessing resources of the federation. It is an SDK for developing applications that access VCT requested resources through the Panlab office services during operation of testing. It is quite easy to embed it into your application/ SUT in order to gain control of the requested resources during testing. The FCI is delivered to the customer after the generation of the SLA and not only does it contain the necessary libraries but also the alias of the resources that are used in the VCT scenario. This allows the User-Application/SUT to access the testbed resources during execution of the experiment in order to manage and configure various environment parameters or to get status of the resources. In brief these are the requirements and the process:
- FCI is an Eclipse based SDK.
- You need to download from Panlab the FCI plugins and the FCI Core libraries and install
- You need to modify your application (SUT) to access resources in the federation (if you need to do this) according to your initial VCT request
- Execute your application either at your premises or inside a resource
- You can also operate the requested VCT even from another application while your tests execute (i.e. external triggers)