NECOS: Novel Enablers for Cloud Slicing

Description

NECOS proposes a novel solution – Lightweight Slice Defined Cloud (LSDC) – as an approach for automating the process of optimal cloud configuration by extending the virtualization concept to all resources in slices of a data center and by providing a uniform management with a high-level of autonomicity for the currently separated computing, connectivity, and storage resources.

NECOS aims to develop Lightweight Slice Defined Cloud (LSDC) with the following characteristics:

1. It presents a new service model – the Slice as a Service. A slice is beneficial as the management software can dynamically map service components to a slice. A slice is a grouping of physical or virtual (network, compute, storage) resources that can act as a sub-cloud, sub-network and can accommodate service components, seemingly independent of other slices.
2. It enables easy deployment, configuration, and adaptation of physical resources in the cloud networking infrastructure, in order to better accommodate the various service demands. This is achieved through using specialised software that can describe and manage the various aspects that comprise the cloud environment.
3. It allows each aspect that comprises the cloud environment – from the networking between virtual machines, to the SLAs of the hosted applications – to be managed via software.
4. It utilises lightweight uniform virtualisation systems and small footprint components deployable on large number of small network and cloud devices at the edges of the network, as well as other network segments such as access, aggregation, core and software networks.