CloudOpting
Second newsletter, March 2015
About the project
The project is aimed at the development of a novel approach to bring public services to the cloud. The primary objective of CloudOpting to deliver a set of tools that will allow local authorities and public administrations to share their services with citizens and third-parties, and migrate existing IT systems on the cloud. This will allow for the reduction of related investment and expenses as a result of an aggregate demand and the measurement and control of costs.
CloudOpting will enhance the adoption of cloud platforms by stimulating a change of practice in public authorities and thus enabling efficient and transparent services, and new market applications to private companies and citizens. Among other benefits, the project will allow public administrations and private companies to create new services capable of interacting and sharing information among them, while providing consumer-oriented front-end interfaces and tools, which are quite intuitive to operate, resulting in an increased expectation and demand for complex services in ever-reducing timescales.
CloudOpting press conference
CloudOpting at Smart City Expo
CloudOpting technical workshop
Project experiments
Next2Me (Experiment 3)
The City Council offers multiple settlements for a better quality of life citizens, intensifying the utilization of the app. Besides, Next2Me increases the popularity of the facilities, being a perfect promotional channel for the emblematic places that the City Council wants to put under the spotlight. The solution is easy to use and intuitive. The user selects which the desired facility to find from a list of services, then chooses the distance radius preferred by sharing his geo-location in order to delimit the area. Once the system has all the inputs a map displays all the chosen nearby services.
Business Portal (Experiment 9)
The advanced business portal has been designed using Alciums Evolutive platform and contains many additional key features such as Customer Relationship Management, Project Management, Reporting and Analysing tools, Tracking and Monitoring, Commercial Property Portal and an Online Business Directory. The system also allows users to create an event portal page using Event Pilot as well as communicate to a databases through an intuitive email marketing system. Alcium provide a bespoke service and thus customers can benefit from a unique customisation of the Evolutive platform with the aim of promoting and selling the benefits of an areas location, services, business support and economic opportunities.
Technological layer
CloudOpting team agreed on the use of Docker (https://www.docker.com/) for the CloudOpting platform as it comes with a handful of advantages that may be even more relevant if we think on Public Administrations. Docker is an open platform for distributed applications allows developers and sysadmins run applications and services as microservices on an isolated, easy, lightweight and fast way.
Docker works over a base image on which we mount all the services we are going to use, mapping the needed ports between host and the container, sharing directories as VOLUMES ( tag used to share this directories), and much more. The lack of a hypervisor drastically reduces the amount of used resources on the host and truns Docker to be a perfect solution to deploy services in different clouds, making an app and its environment much more portable.
To create an image on which a container will be created, the only file the developer or sysadmin need to manage, is the Dockerfile, with a few directives, it's an easy task to Dockerize an app or a service and if it's not enough, Docker comes with a registry of images maintained by the Docker team, is possible use, change create and upload images and Dockerfiles to this public registry, and if the project requires it, is possible to create a private registry because the registry code is open source and hosted on github.
CloudOpting approach will go further on service automation deployment, orchestration and logging, making it simple and easy to use for public administrations who wants to migrate to the cloud.
Submitted deliverables
Deliverable 2.1 - Cloud platform technical requirements
Deliverable 2.2 Architecture of the CloudOpting Platform
Deliverable 2.2 Architecture of the CloudOpting Platform, presents a detailed description of the architecture of the CloudOpting platform and technical specifications. Openness and extensibility will be two key features of the CloudOpting platform. These features are analysed in detail to showcase how the platform supports the development of multiple services, along with their deployment across the diverse city and region environments.
Deliverable 3.1 - Technical and legal requirements
The outcome of this deliverable is expected to serve as a guidance for the execution of the CloudOpting’s experiments, and a guidance for any Public Entity examining, and willing to undergo the process of getting its services hosted within the CloudOpting platform.
Deliverable 5.1 Operation business model and TCO Framework
Deliverable 5.1 Operation business model and TCO Framework aims at defining the business model of each service that is going to be deployed in the CloudOpting platform. All these models are shaped and based on the features and functionalities that provides the platform itself, as well as on the actors and agents that configure the CloudOpting ecosystem.
Events
CloudOpting press conference, November 14, 2014
Josep Ramón Ferrer, Strategic Director Smart Cities and Telecommunications at the Bacelona City Council, welcomed the atendees of the press conference with a few inspiring words about the strategic importance to define and promote a new model for way to make the government more efficient while at the same time improving services for citizens and businesses. He then fortified CloudOpting as one of the several ambitious Cloud initiatives of the Municipality aiming to contribute to this objective.
Sergio Jerez, Mobile, eGovernment and Data Director at the Barcelona City Council and Xavier Xicota, a Cloud expert and CloudOpting coordinator, also discused the significance of the project for a digitally flourishing smart city, introducing its planned objectives and activities, along with the expected benefits it will bring to both Public Administrations and society.
CloudOpting consortium members Manel Carrión Ribas, Deputy Chairman of Economics and General Services of the Municipality of Sant Feliu de Llobregat and Razvan Savu, Director of Strategy and Cloud Solutions at Ymens (Teamnet) discussed their strategic partner role in the project as representatives of the public and private sector respectively.
The event brought together more than fifty government and business figures that came to give support, ask questions and take advantage of the opportunity to discuss potential joint activities.
Smart City Expo, November 17-19, 2014
Technical workshop in Barcelona, February 2-4, 2015
Mobile World Congress
Over the course of four days, 2-5 March 2015, Mobile World Capital Barcelona will host the world’s greatest mobile event: Mobile World Congress. The 2015 GSMA Mobile World Congress will convene industry leaders, visionaries and innovators to explore the trends that will shape mobile in the years ahead.
CloudOpting will be presented by Worldline, as project partner bringing two of the twelve experiments to be migrated on the Cloud.
Monday, Mar 2, 2015, 09:00 AM
Fira de Barcelona, Barcelona, Spain
CloudOpting workshop in Turin, April 2015 (dates TBC)
Stay tuned!
The @cloudopting twitter account has been created and is continuously used to share interesting news and events related to the project as well as other technology areas. The project website is available at www.cloudopting.eu and features the latest updates around the project status. Make sure you are the first to receive CloudOpting news and event invitations – join our newsletter mailing list at on our website.