DECIDE-DevOps for trusted, portable and interoperable Multi-Cloud applications towards the digital single market

What if we could change a flat tyre of our car, in the motorway, at 90 km per hour without stopping the car or interrupting our trip? And what if we could select at the same time the best available new tyre? The most appropriate one based on our car’s make and model, the road we are circulating by, the weather or the special offers available in the market?

This situation, substituting the car by a software application is the one that DECIDE European project is tackling and aims to succeed in a solution. DECIDE is a research action, funded by the European Commission under the Horizon 2020 program, whose main objective is to provide mechanisms and tools that allows the design, develop and dynamically (re) deployment (based on the changeable environmental conditions) of multi-cloud software applications. For DECIDE, multi-cloud software applications are distributed applications which components are deployed over heterogeneous and different cloud service providers (public and private) based on the specific non-functional requirements needed for each component. Following this approach, the application as a whole can benefit from the best combination of cloud services supporting the needs of each of the components forming it. For example, if the application comprises a data base with very strict legal requirements (due to the sensitive nature of the data it handles), but at the same time it needs to use a great amount of computational resources for supporting peaks of usage of the application in certain moments, it can support both requirements in an optimal way by combining cloud services form different providers. 

How many times have we got the message “page not available”, just the day that the tickets for that million record selling artist come out? Using DECIDE tools, it would not be necessary to wait just until 00:01h of the selected date to buy the tickets for our favourite artist.

DECIDE will prepare the application to operate in a multi-cloud environment and it will simulate the deployment environment prior to the actual deployment providing the best combination of cloud services topology. Furthermore, once it is deployed, DECIDE will support the monitoring of the behaviour of the application (and the underlying used cloud services) and its semi-automatically re-deployment.

Back to the automotive metaphor, it is true that we won’t need in every case or under any circumstances to change the tyre without stopping the car, or neither to have the optimal wheel in the market (regarding its cost, characteristics or adaptability). However, if we are talking about a transportation where the need to be on time is critical (i.e. organ transplant, or if stopping the vehicle involves a high risk (i.e. dangerous goods), one can easily imagine the provided benefits.

In the same way, DECIDE will improve the productivity and decrease the time-to market of applications which require high rates of performance and reliability, and applications which legal requirements of the cloud resources where the application is deployed are critic, due to the nature of the managed information. 

DECIDE wants to implement a DevOps (Development & Operation) framework for supporting software developer and operator companies in:

• Improving multi-cloud applicaitons development and operation processes
• Improving the productivity of the software developers and operators 
• Assuring the maintainability, quality of experience, and quality of service during the whole application lifecycle.
• And decreasing the “time-to-market”.  

DECIDE will advance the current state of the art proposing relevant innovations in the following subjects in the DevOps cycle:

• Definition and characterization of multi-cloud applications whose software components can be deployed in a distributed manner into different cloud providers, getting the best combination of cloud resources for the entire application.
• Development of mechanisms to allow pre-deployment simulation of the best combination of cloud services for a concrete application with specific non-functional requirements.
• Implementation of tools which support the continuous monitoring and adaptation of multi-cloud applications based on the changes of their non-functional properties or the SLAs of the used cloud services.
• Development of mechanisms for intelligent discovering, combination and monitoring of cloud services (or combination of cloud services) available at each moment.
• Implementation of an integrated DevOps framework easing the information workflow between the tools supporting each of the phases of the software development lifecycle.

DECIDE  action kick off meeting, which is coordinated by TECNALIA, tool place on the 13th and 14th of December 2016 in TECNALIA premises, where all the partners participated: AIMES, ARSYS, HPE, Innovati, Timelex, Fraunhofer and CloudBroker to establish the bases, objectives and technical challenges of the project.