A Framework for Implementing and Managing Platform as a Service in a Virtual Cloud Computing Lab

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I. INTRODUCTION
Cloud computing is developing based on years’
achievement on virtualization, Grid computing,
Web computing, utility computing and related
technologies. Cloud computing provides both
platforms and applications on-demand through
Internet or intranet [1][2][7][13]. Some examples of
emerging Cloud computing platforms are Google
App Engine [14], IBM blue Cloud [16], Amazon
EC2 [17] and Microsoft Azure [18]. The Cloud
allows sharing, allocation and aggregation of
software, computational and storage network
resources on-demand.


III. IMPLEMENTATIONAL AND OPERATIONAL
ENVIRONMENT
The system is developed using open resources
including Apache web server, MySQL database
server, OpenSSH remote access tools; also
VMWare workstation 5.5 is used to create virtual
platforms. Figure 6 shows an example of Web
interface. The user can select appropriate operating
platforms with application software. There are two
kinds of choices: immediate (now) application and
reservation for future use. The user should choose
amount of time for his application. Some typical
application platforms are shown in Figure7. Figure
8 provides an application scenario of using Linux
platform.



IV. RELATED WORK
There may be no consistent definition for Cloud
computing yet, however, practitioners are designing
and implementing some application examples such
as Google App Engine, IBM blue Cloud, Amazon
EC2 and Microsoft Azure. There are many
pioneering work in this area, many people think that
Cloud computing becomes popular after IBM and
Google jointly announced Cloud computing plan in
2007. IBM introduces its blue Cloud in [2][16],
Google’s App Engine[15] and related Google file
system [8], BigTable [4] and MapReduce [6] are
considered to have laid foundation for Cloud
computing. A virtual computing lab (and then
Cloud computing) was built since 2004 [12]. Cloud
implementation and research related issues are
discussed in [2][7][12][13]. As this writing, more
than 30,000 teachers and students use VCL [12] at
NCSU each year. Eucalyptus [7] is among one of
a few an open-source systems for implementing
on-premise private and hybrid clouds using the
hardware and software infrastructure. Eucalyptus
adds capabilities such as end-user customization,
self-service provisioning, and legacy application
support to data center virtualization features,
making IT customer service easier, more fully
featured, and less expensive.


V. CONCLUSION
In this paper, a framework implementing and
managing platform as a service in a virtual Cloud
computing lab is developed. The system has good
expandability and can improve resource’s sharing
and utilization. In the future we will extend the
framework to include imaging of software and
hardware platforms, load balancing and complete
automatic provisioning of resources so that the
system can be applied in large-scale and distributed
environment.