CloudOpting Newsletter
Fourth Newsletter, March 2016
CloudOpting Marketplace Released
The CloudOpting team, after two years of development of the project had provisioned an interoperable platform avoiding vendor lock in’s, addressing appropriate business modes with respect to public administrations, software developers, and platform providers, as well as analysed the policies and how to adapt them to the actual technologies proposed, as well as proved an cost-effective method to migrate to cloud actual public services.
We have developed an architecture capable of deploying any service in any cloud, independently of the underling cloud infrastructure. This architecture has been developed and published as Open Source, under MIT licensing schema.
The architecture is divided into four main blocks, namely:
- the Service Catalogue is the main interface within the Service Publisher and Service Subscriber, and has been designed to easy the life of the user, guiding them in the process of publishing and subscribing to a service;
- the CloudOpting manager is designed to mask the complexity of the deployment of services, and has a REST API wherever the calls from the Service Catalogue are received, and has a Business Process Manager (Activiti) and a Tosca Parser as part of the Orchestrator to either way define the service at the time of being published, as well as parse and execute the deployment process of the service. Furthermore, this module contains five components for logging layer and data collection (Fluentd), monitoring (Zabbix) and analytics (Elastic), a database for persistent storage (Postgress) and a file manager for storing documents and software (Jackrabbit);
- the Docker Crane module, that is a tool to orchestrate Docker containers, contains, a commander that manages the Puppet scripts (R10K) and in-memory data structure store, used as database, cache and message broker (redis) and finally Docker Compose and Docker Swarm that compose and manages the Docker containers;
- the cloud environment bellow that can be any cloud, that hosts the Virtual machines that contains the Docker Containers and the Zabbix agents inside.
The Publishing and Subscription process
The vision of CloudOpting team is to stablish the correct procedures and methodology to migrate a service and to publish it, and to subscribe to a service, deploy it and operate it in any cloud environment, thus next figure depicts the process.
A full catalogue of Public Services
The front end for the platform is to expose a marketplace with a full set of services in the catalogue that can be easily replicated among state members. It is the front end with Service Subscribers and Service Publishers.
The CloudOpting Promotional Video
CloudOpting Marketplace Demonstration
The main objective of the CloudOpting project is to increase the uptake and usage of Cloud computing technologies by public administrations through the provision of a Cloud platform where public institutions and government bodies can migrate existing IT applications and services in order to: Deliver online public services to citizens and third-parties; Centrally manage operational data and citizen information within a controlled environment; Allow citizens to develop innovative new services.
Market watch
In order to determine the number of subscriptions that a service will have, it is necessary to assess the size of the market the service will have, the number of Public Entities that will join CloudOpting and the proportion of Public Entities that once joined CloudOpting will subscribe to the service. There are more than 130.000 Public Entities the European Union, and 120.000 of them are local governments. The rest of them, are regional and national governments, aggregators of Public Entities, and other public institutions.
During the project the goal is to reach 24 engagements and 10 conversions of this previous figures before-mentioned Public Entities to joint CloudOpting.
Stakeholders
The main stakeholders of the project are Service Providers, Service Subscribers and Platform Providers. However, there are other several specific roles taking part of the CloudOpting environment like Final User, Application Owner, Application Developer, Application Provider, Infrastructure Owner, Infrastructure Operator, Value-Added-Resellers and Investors.
CloudOpting positioning and value
The CloudOpting Business Model is based on three pillars:
- First, CloudOpting must have an economy of scale with which the cost of a service is shared between its customers. Thus, the unitary cost of a service will decrease by increasing the number of customers. This kind of economy will ensure that CloudOpting can offer an attractive pricing to its customers and that they will be willing to contribute in CloudOpting growth as this will mean a reduction in the price of services they contract.
- Second, CloudOpting needs a powerful distribution channel to attract new participants, ensure its spreading across all Europe and benefit its customers with the economy of scale.
- Thirdly the rewarding CloudOpting Rewarding System to encourage the growth of CloudOpting, and thus its economy of scale, as well as promoting equity between CloudOpting participants and avoiding monopoly. This will be done by encouraging the inclusion of Small Public Entities, Medium Public Entities and Aggregators of Public Entities and by helping Small and Medium Enterprises to publish their services and to get more subscriptions.
CLOUDOPTING BBC NEWS INTERVIEW
CLOUDOPTING AT THE MOBILE WORLD CONGRESS 2016
The CloudOpting project was presented in February 2016 in the framework of the Mobile World Congress that is taking place in Barcelona. We presented the project, the current status of our Marketplace and the business model that binds all the components together.
The presentation ended with a live demo where we showed the audience how to use the catalogue and our most outstanding mobile applications that are already available.
CLOUDOPTING INVOLVED AT POLICY & NETWORKING MEETING
H2020 INSO-1-2014 & 2015 Projects ICT – enabled open government
CloudOpting has been represented by Ignasi Soler (Smart Partners) and Genis Mauri ( SDG Group) at the meeting organized by the European Commission to present CloudOpting preliminary results.
Three interesting round tables talking about sustainability of the projects, policies in public administrations and innovations arisen from projects had been discussed in depth. Very well conducted by Patrick Bourrel and the interesting discussions have been very profitable for CloudOpting. Sinergies and discussions with other Open Government services had been conducted and furthers communications of CloudOpting will be sent to all the participants of the event.
CLOUDOPTING AT THE 2015 SMART CITY EXPO WORLD CONGRESS
CloudOpting was present at the Smart City Expo 2015 in the booth of the Municipality of Barcelona, the event that brought together over 500 cities, 465 exhibitors, more than 400 speakers, and 14.000 visitors. Many contacts were made with the aim of promoting the platform. The event was also used to present publicly the new video.
CLOUDOPTING IMMERSION @SLUSH 2015
CloudOpting was present at the Slush 2015, an event that is built for entrepreneurs by entrepreneurs, and it is meant for growth companies of all stages and industries. Whether you are looking for investors, customers, media exposure or mentoring. The event gathered over 5.000 attendees, including 1.700 start-up’s, 800 venture capital investors and 630 journalists from exactly 100 countries. Some contacts were made with the aim of promoting the platform and find investors when the start-up is formed. The event was also used to present publicly the new Leaflet and the brand new draft promotional video.
The CloudOpting platform in GitHub
About the CloudOpting project
CloudOpting can help your organization, private or public, to take full advantage of the Cloud, while reducing costs, increasing agility and bringing new services to the community.
Email: info@cloudopting.eu
Website: www.cloudopting.eu
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Twitter: @cloudopting