First release

We are pleased to announce the first release of fogbow!

Fogbow is an umbrella for cloud-related projects, that, together, enable a federated and oppostunistic cloud.

By installing a fogbow-manager on top of an existing cloud, like Openstack, a cloud administrator will make its administrative domain part of a fogbow federation. A fogbow federation allows local cloud users to use surplus resources coming from other members of the federation.

Although this approach does not guarantee high QoS, it is an alternative for limitations imposed by restricitive stock policies (in public clouds) or by an small amount of existing resources and quotas (in private clouds).. This is particularly useful for Bag-of-Task applications (parallel applications whose tasks are independent), specially those formed by hundred of tasks.

When using a fogbow federation, users request as many as instances as needed, even if this number is well above their local quota.. At first, the fogbow manager will try to create instances locally. If there are not enough resources available in the local cloud, the manager will contact other federation members to create instances in remote private clouds.

The fogbow-manager is agnostic to the underlying cloud technology, as it communicates with the cloud components via a plugin layer instantiated at runtime. This first release comes with plugins to an OCCI-enabled Openstack.

A fobgow federation has, at least, one fogbow-rendezvous component running. The fogbow-rendezvous acts as a discovery service, although it also shares with the federation resource utilization on each member.

At last, the fogbow-opportunism module enables compute nodes to execute in an opportunistic fashion, i.e., only idle nodes should show up to the cloud. Idleness is determined by a python service called powernap, and currently we support Openstack's nova compute. Such an approach is interesting when there aren't dedicated resources available to the cloud, eg.: a desktop-based environment.

To know more about the architecture, the installation and configuration and how to use the fogbow components, please visit http://fogbowcloud.org. And by the way, we are open-source, so pull requests to http://github.com/fogbow are welcome. :)

Regards,
the fogbow team