Deliverable D6.3 The basic MIDAS platform and the integrated test evaluation, planning and scheduling macro-component, released

The MIDAS Testing as a Service platform (TPaaS) has been designed, architected, and implemented according to a SOA-based paradigm, and provided as an integrated Testing as a Service framework available on demand, i.e., on a self-provisioning, pay-per-use, elastic basis. At this time (24th month), the first version of the MIDAS TPaaS platform has been delivered; it integrates the first set of test components developed by the MIDAS partners for supporting SOA testing activities.

More specifically, to allow the test method developer partners to integrate their methods in the developed MIDAS TPaaS platform, they have been provided with a seamless, loosely coupled development and integration platform adopting a virtualization approach. The MIDAS developers have been equipped with an environment relying on open-source and stable virtualization technologies to deploy all the MIDAS components in a consolidated virtual machine. The selected tools used to set up the virtual machine are Vagrant and Ansible, which allow their users to create and configure lightweight, reproducible, and portable virtual machine environments, and Virtual Box that is the virtual machine hypervisor [3]. This virtual machine includes standard hardware architecture, operating system, developer tools, application containers, web servers, and libraries shared among all partners as a VMI, as described in [1], and it represents the MIDAS Development Environment. The Ansible and Vagrant software tools are also used to deploy the MIDAS platform on the Cloud infrastructure with all the added components integrated in it (the MIDAS Production Environment). In such an environment, all MIDAS components, together with a basic MIDAS user front-end (i.e., the MIDAS Portal that is the component implemented to facilitate the human end user of the MIDAS platform), are deployed on the Cloud by exploiting all the Cloud building blocks (Cloud Computing resources, Auto Scaling, Storage, Elastic Load Balancing, and so on) and putting in place the deployment strategies proposed in [6].

A preliminary analysis of the costs of the Cloud resources has been reported in D6.2 [6], and a more detailed analysis of the expected fixed and variable costs of the Cloud resources is described in D8.3. The results obtained from these studies have been taken into account in designing guidelines and implementation choices that have driven the development of the current version of the MIDAS TPaaS Accounting & Billing Service, and the MIDAS monitoring. About that, some MIDAS-specific logging and tracing solutions have been proposed and implemented to provide advanced information on the usage of the MIDAS resources and to exploit such information to design more advanced accounting information for the MIDAS tenancies.

Finally, in setting up the MIDAS TPaaS platform, security problems, occurring when adopting Cloud computing, have been considered. Indeed, a first investigation on security and data confidentiality in Cloud computing has been done. The outcomes of this task have been used as basic framework to tackle the main security concerns related to the development and the use of the MIDAS TPaaS platform.

[1] Tonellotto, .N, Di Napoli, C., De Francesco, A. Giordano, M., Wendland, M., Maesano, L., & De Rosa, F. (2013). Analysis of required functionalities and available public Cloud services. Tech. Rep. D6.1, EC FP7 – MIDAS Project #318786.
[3] “Virtual Machine Image Guide: How to develop MIDAS components – v1.2” available at http://web.ita.es/midas/files/2014/09/MIDAS_Virtual_Machine_Image_Guide_v1.2.pdf
[6] Tonellotto, .N, Di Napoli, C., De Francesco, A. Giordano, M., De Rosa, F., Maesano, L. (2014). Specification and design of the basic MIDAS platform as a service on the Cloud. Tech. Rep. D6.2, EC FP7 – MIDAS Project #318786.