The recent trend toward application hosting in large data centers should and will be counterbalanced by a ubiquitous edge cloud with deeply programmable networking. The Internet to date has been dominated by sending data to programs and people; the next Internet will be dominated by managing data and the connections to people generating and needing the data. In this article, we describe why the Internet is on the cusp of this transition, two prototypes of this next Internet, PlanetLab [1] and the Global Environment for Network Innovations (GENI) [2], and the architectural concepts that emerge from them. We describe the next step: the viral stage, GENI-as-a- Service.

CORD is a new design of a telco central office that replaces closed and proprietary hardware with software running on commodity servers, switches, and access devices. It allows network operators to benefit from both the economies of scale (infrastructure constructed from a few commodity building blocks) and agility (the ability to rapidly deploy and elastically scale services) that commodity cloud providers enjoy today. This article introduces the CORD architecture and describes an open reference implementation of CORD that is available for evaluation.

PlanetIgnite is a general-purpose, Infrastructure-as-a-Service, self-assembling, lightweight edge cloud on virtualized infrastructure with support for single-pane-of-glass distributed application configuration and deployment. This is an entirely new concept. PlanetLab[32], GENI[7], [22], and SAVI[19] are general-purpose IaaS edge clouds, but require top-down installation and dedicated hardware resources at each site and do not offer single-pane-of-glass application deployment. Seattle[11] is a lightweight self-assembling edge cloud that offers single-pane-of-class configuration and control, but developers are restricted to using a subset of Python. PlanetIgnite is a Containers-as-a-Service Edge Cloud which offers Docker Containers to each PlanetIgnite user. A PlanetIgnite node is an off-the-shelf Ubuntu 14.04 Virtual machine with Docker installed, meaning it can be installed on any edge node where a VM with a routable v4 address is available. Adding a PlanetIgnite node to the infrastructure is simple: a site wishing to host a PlanetIgnite node simply downloads the image, on boot, the new PlanetIgnite node registers with the PlanetIgnite portal, which runs a series of acceptance tests. Once complete, the image is registered and the node is added to the set of PlanetIgnite sites.

Researchers and educators in computer science and other domains are increasingly turning to distributed test beds that offer access to a variety of resources, including networking, computation, storage, sensing, and actuation. The provisioning of resources from their owners to interested experimenters requires establishing sufficient mutual trust between these parties. Building such trust directly between researchers and resource owners will not scale as the number of experimenters and resource owners grows. The NSF GENI (Global Environment for Network Innovation) project has focused on establishing scalable mechanisms for maintaining such trust based on common approaches for authentication, authorization and accountability. Such trust reflects the actual trust relationships and agreements among humans or real-world organizations. We describe here GENI’s approaches for federated trust based on mutually trusted authorities, and implemented via cryptographically signed credentials and shared policies.

Jay Aikat, UNC Chapel Hill, USA Andy Bavier, Princeton University, USA Mark Berman, BBN Technologies, USA Sarah Edwards, BBN Technologies, USA Eric Eide, University of Utah, USA Ted Faber, ISI, USA David Irwin, University of Massachusetts Amherst, USA Kostas Kavoussanakis, University of Edinburgh, UK Thanasis Korakis, NYU Poly, USA Yaoqing Liu, Clarkson University, USA Ibrahim Matta, Boston University, USA Paul Mueller, University of Kaiserslautern, Germany Odysseas Koufopavlou, University of Patras, Greece Thierry Rakotoarivelo, NICTA (National ICT Australia), Australia Yin Pan, Rochester Institute of Technology, USA Niky Riga, BBN Technologies, USA Ivan Seskar, Rutgers University, USA Violet R. Syrotiuk, Arizona State University, USA Vicraj Thomas, BBN Technologies, USA Bing Wang, University of Connecticut, USA KC Wang, Clemson University, USA Kaiqi Xiong, Rochester Institute of Technology, USA Zhi-Li Zhang, University of Minnesota, USA Yanyong Zhang, Rutgers University, USA

This paper describes XOS, a cloud operating system designed to manage hardware and software resources across a multi-tiered cloud. XOS raises the level of abstraction in an IaaS cloud architecture by elevating scalable software services to first-class objects. This involves adopting three design principles: (1) Everything-as-a-Service (XaaS) (services are building blocks, and combinations of those building blocks are also services); (2) Multi-tenancy (a tenant relationship links one service to another, and facilitates reasoning about safety, privacy and efficiency); and (3) Control/Data-plane separation (services are configured through a logically centralized service controller interface, but the controller is not on the data path between services). XOS applies these principles through the lens of an operating system - it defines a set of abstractions that support constructing multi-tenant services that can be folded back into XOS as available building blocks, while also extending the capabilities of conventional IaaS. The paper shows how these abstractions can be used to build a functional, evolvable, service-oriented cloud.

The Great Plains Environment for Network Innovation (GpENI) is an international programmable network testbed centered initially in the Midwest US with the goal to provide programmability across the entire protocol stack. In this paper, we present the overall GpENI framework and our implementation experience for the programmable routing environment and the dynamic circuit network (DCN). GpENI is built to provide a collaborative research infrastructure enabling the research community to conduct experiments in Future Internet architecture. We present illustrative examples of our experimentation in the GpENI platform.

We describe the GENI Experiment Engine, a Distributed-Platform-as-a-Service facility designed to be implemented on a distributed testbed or infrastructure. The GEE is intended to provide rapid and convenient access to a distributed infrastructure for simple, easy-to-configure experiments and applications. Specifically, the design goal of the GEE is to permit experimenters and application writers to: (a) allocate a GEE slicelet; (b) deploy a simple experiment or application; (c) run the experiment; (d) collect the results; and (e) tear down the experiment, starting from scratch, within five minutes. The GEE consists of four cooperating services over the GENI infrastructure, which together with pre-allocated slicelets and a pre-allocated network offers a complete, ready to use, sliceable platform over the GENI Infrastructure.

The Great Plains Environment for Network Innovation (GpENI) is an international programmable network testbed centered initially in the Midwest US with the goal to provide programmability across the entire protocol stack. In this paper, we present the overall GpENI framework and our implementation experience for the programmable routing environment and the dynamic circuit network (DCN). GpENI is built to provide a collaborative research infrastructure enabling the research community to conduct experiments in Future Internet architecture. We present illustrative examples of our experimentation in the GpENI platform.

In this paper, we describe InstaGENI, a distributed cloud based on programmable networks designed for the GENI Mesoscale deployment and large-scale distributed research projects. The InstaGENI architecture closely integrates a lightweight cluster design with software-defined networking, Hardware-as-a-Service and Containers-as-a-Service, remote monitoring and management, and high-performance inter-site networking. The initial InstaGENI deployment will encompass 34 sites across the United States, interconnected through a specialized GENI backbone network deployed over national, regional and campus research and education networks, with international network extensions to sites across the world.

This paper presents a case for applying the principles of Software-Defined Networking (SDN) to middleboxes and end hosts. The challenges of configuring networking on network hosts resemble those addressed by SDN - numerous multi-vendor components, each with its own syntax and idiosyncratic corner cases, must be orchestrated smoothly. We have developed a prototype called NativeClick, a novel use of the Click Modular Router language, to orchestrate Linux networking tools. NativeClick demonstrates that, while existing SDN efforts have produced insufficient Abstractions to cover a wide range of networking behavior, SDN-like abstractions can make host configurations modular.

In this paper, we argue that federation of cloud systems requires a standard API for users to create, manage, and destroy virtual objects, and a standard naming scheme for virtual objects. We introduce an existing API for this purpose, the Slice-Based Federation Architecture, and demonstrate that it can be implemented on a number of existing cloud management systems. We introduce a simple naming scheme for virtual objects, and discuss its implementation.

The National Science Foundations Global Environment for Network Innovations (GENI) is an effort to build an environment for large-scale networking experimental research in novel network services and architectures. Deploying an environment to support these research activities requires a platform of sliceable, reservable compute and network resources that are deeply programmable, widely deployed, highly instrumented and directly accessible to end-users at many layers. The GENI Mesoscale deployment envisions a network of distributed clusters (“GENI racks”) running the OpenFlow framework and supporting the GENI AM API, an emerging standard for federation and interoperability. InstaGENI, a collaborative partnership effort of HP, Northwestern, Princeton, the University of Utah, and the Open Networking Institute, is one of the two funded GENI rack deployment efforts. InstaGENI features a lightweight, expandable cluster design featuring integration with the FlowVisor OpenFlow Aggregate Manager (FOAM), ProtoGENI and PlanetLab Aggregate Managers, and L2 connectivity to national research networks. InstaGENI racks will federate with existing Slice Authorities such as GPO GENI, ProtoGENI, and PlanetLab Central, enabling researchers in these communities to allocate resources across the InstaGENI deployment.

In this paper, we argue that federation of cloud systems requires a standard API for users to create, manage, and destroy virtual objects, and a standard naming scheme for virtual objects. We introduce an existing API for this purpose, the SliceBased Federation Architecture, and demonstrate that it can be implemented on a number of existing cloud management systems. We introduce a simple naming scheme for virtual objects, and discuss its implementation.

Great Plains Environment for Network Innovation (GpENI) is an international testbed for future Internet research. A key component of GpENI is programmable network virtualization (GpENI-VINI). The scope of this paper is to present the framework, implementation and integration experience with network virtualization in GpENI. In particular, this is described through our experience of implementing and integrating the XORP (eXtensible Open Router Platform) routing platform into GpENI-VINI. Preliminary results on measurements and validation are presented.