The rapid advancements of cloud computing technologies witness the creation of many cloud vendors and services with their own unique strengths and shortages. Similar to many other applications, geospatial applications can greatly benefit from the virtually unlimited resources of cloud computing. Many scientist and geospatial application providers are considering transforming their current computing infrastructure into clouds (IaaS and PaaS). However, it is a big challenge to select the most suitable cloud platforms and configuration solutions for the cloud novices and even for experienced cloud users due to the following reasons:
1) Different capacity and advantages of each cloud product;
2) Various requirements and constraints for computing resources of the
application; and
3) Trade-off between cost and performance.
These factors make cloud solution selection oriented complex and difficult task. Therefore, it is highly desirable to design and develop a web-based advising tool to assist domain experts from earth science to compare and select the most suitable cloud solution. Such a tool should integrate computing experiences and knowledge and is capable of recommend cloud solutions to achieve cost-efficiency and high performance. The ESIP P&S committee announced the project to develop a cloud adoption advisory tool. The objectives of the project are to
1) Help cloud novices understand the basic concepts and potential applications of cloud computing providers, services and technologies;
2) Assist cloud computing early adopters easily and effectively select the best solutions based on their unique application requirements; and
3) Periodically collect/update the mainstream cloud platforms’ information and build an expert system and database.
We proposed and were awarded to develop such a tool includes
1) A database/warehouse that stores pricing strategies and configuration schemes of mainstream Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) and Platform as a Service (PaaS) level cloud platforms;
2) A general cost assessment model and a cloud function measurement criteria model for different cloud platforms and application types; and
3) A web-based Graphical User Interface (GUI) to be integrated with ESIP Testbed portal for help users select cloud solutions by evaluating their application requirements through interactive and visual manners.
Short name:
advisory_tool
Project type:
Full project
Enable issue tracker:
Yes
Demo Site:
Documentation:
