Developing OpenStack-based networking for RECIRCLE

Abstract

Cloud systems are among the fastest and most innovative growing sectors in information technology, with numerous and remarkable advantages based on virtualization technologies. Cloud computing at BME is no exception as with CIRCLE manager (Cloud IaaS for Research and Education). Hosted, developed and used quite heavily at the Faculty of Electrical Engineering and Informatics, by the students for classes, research and assignments. Continuous improvements are required to keep systems up-to-date. RECIRCLE arises from this concern, seeking for a modern and refactored approach by making the system more modular and easy to maintain. Renewing the virtualization back-end by externalizing it to OpenStack, which is the most popular open-source platform, with an active and large community, meets the current CIRCLE requirements and offers a great potential to enable new features. In order to connect it to RECIRCLE and stay interchangeable, an interface in between is needed. Therefore, my task was to get to know the existing cloud architecture and design and develop a network module, for the interface layer, aiming to enable users to manage the access and network infrastructure of their virtual machines. Therefore, in my dissertation, I start by introducing topics around Cloud Computing, to build a basis. Later on, both RECIRCLE/CIRCLE and OpenStack are presented and discussed focusing to face the implementation requirements. Finally a pilot implementation based on Python and the OpenStack SDK is described, detailing the developed features. Also, some usage examples along with steps to reproduce scenarios are given.