Seminar : Building clouds with Eucalyptus

Abstract :

Cloud computing is becoming a well-known buzzword nowadays. It describes a new supplement, consumption and delivery model for IT services based on Internet, and typically involves the provision of dynamically scalable and often virtualized resources as a service over the Internet. Goldman Sachs, Wells Fargo Securities, Gartner and other prominent observers of the technology industry predict that cloud computing is the most significant IT shift of this decade.

EUCALYPTUS – Elastic Utility Computing Architecture Linking Your Programs To Useful System enables hybrid cloud and private cloud deployments for enterprise data centers and requires no special purpose hardware or reconfiguration. Leveraging Linux and web service technologies that commonly exist in today's IT infrastructure, Eucalyptus allows customers quickly and easily to create computing clouds “on premise” that are tailored to their specific application needs. At the same time, Eucalyptus supports the popular AWS cloud interface allowing these on-premise clouds to interact with public clouds using a common programming interface. Along with managing virtual machines, the technology supports secure virtualization of the network as well as the storage infrastructure within the cloud environment.

Through this seminar, EUCALYPTUS is presented as an open source software framework for cloud computing that implements what is commonly referred to as Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS); systems that give users the ability to run and control entire virtual machine instances deployed across a variety physical resources. This also outlines the basic principles of the EUCALYPTUS design, detail important operational aspects of the system, and discuss architectural trade-offs that allows Eucalyptus to be portable, modular and simpler to use on infrastructure commonly found within academic settings. 

Mini project : Website for interior designing

Topic Selection : There were many options available, though this time the deadline was much closer without any hope for extension(less than 2 weeks). In order not to repeat the earlier mistakes, we discussed available alternatives for first two days and finally came up with INTERIOR DESIGNING. This one seemed to be related to our daily life and hence having practical importance.
Project Development : Without any further delay, we choosed to go by RAD model and started to gather informations regarding interior designing. As usual, we divided this gathering part among us as :

•  Interior : including different parts of home and office,
•  Furnitures : appropriate for the required interior,
•  Vaastu : involved in designing various important parts of home and office,
•  Softwares : required to develop webpages, drop down menu, mini-server to launch our website and manage pictures for slideshow

Though the first three were completed within next 2 days, but softwares were yet to be finalised in terms of compatibility of usage by all the team members.
Softwares used finally : 

• DREAMWEAVER:

        Adobe Dreamweaver (formerly Macromedia Dreamweaver) is a web development application originally created by Macromedia, and is now developed by Adobe Systems, which acquired Macromedia in 2005. Dreamweaver is available for both Mac and Windows operating systems. Recent versions have incorporated support for web technologies such as CSS, JavaScript, and various server-side scripting languages and frameworks including ASP, ColdFusion, and PHP.

• SOTHINK-FREE-MENU-BUILDER:

        Free DHTML Menu, an easy to use drop down menu builder, which helped us to create the clear navigation bar in clicks. This JavaScript menu creator makes cross-browser web menu without DHTML and JavaScript experience needed. DHTML Menu freeware provides menu templates to simplify design work. The menu appearance can be fully customized.

• WAMPSERVER:

        WAMP, a form of mini-server that can run on almost any Windows Operating System. WAMP includes Apache 2, PHP 5 (SMTP ports are disabled), and MySQL (phpMyAdmin and SQLitemanager are installed to manage your databases) preinstalled.An icon on the taskbar tray displays the status of WAMP, letting you know if:

1. WAMP is running but no services are opened (the icon will appear red),
2. WAMP is running and one service is opened (the icon will appear yellow)  or
3. WAMP is running with all services opened (the icon will appear white).

        Apache and MySQL are considered to be services (they can be disabled by left-clicking on the taskbar icon, guiding your cursor over the service you wish to disable and selecting “Stop Service”). The files/web pages that are hosted on your WAMP server can be accessed by typing http://localhost/ or http://127.0.0.1/ in the address bar of your web browser. WAMP must be running in order to access either of the above addresses. If you would like to share your files/web pages with others, click on the icon located on your taskbar tray and select “Put Online.” You must have access to the Internet in order to continue.

• ADOBE PHOTOSHOP:

        A computer pixel drawing program used mainly to create images that have
complex texture and shading such as photographs and paintings - the other type of computer 
drawing program is line and shape based (vector drawing) and is better for drawing high precision 
images with lines.
 Here I have shown few snapshots of our webpage : 

Finally, after preparing all the webpages with pics from interiodecor, the next challenge was to link all the web pages and relate the entries from the end user to the MySQL of WAMP server using PHP. 

After completion of website with all basic entities, we started to modify it in terms of validation required for:

• Registration form, so as to ensure completely filled up form alongwith  choice to input values not in the alternatives available and cross checking user id for availability while submitting the form,
• Log in form, so as to make our website services available to only registered user,
• After log in, end user were allowed to post their query that was stored within their database account in MySQL.

Challenges faced: 

• While launching Wampserver : Problem occured in freeing port 80, that was assumed to be the default port for WAMP,  to get it available for Apache. This can be solved by :  Opening Apache->httpd.conf, and replacing the port no.- 80 with 8088, wherever present and saving                                   the changes to continue.
• While validating the end user from available databases.

Key learnings:

• Basics of PHP,
• Learnt to create webpages with slideshow and pop-up menu, along with validations and
• Got introduced to softwares like dreamweaver,  So-think-menu-builder, WAMP

Mini project : tourism database management systems

Topic Selection : 

         This one being the base of all our further proceedings was the most time consuming part of developing this project. As, a group of four members with different perspectives, we spent first week in deciding our topic and finally came up with TOURISM DATABASE MANAGEMENT SYSTEMS, as this one was something that seemed to provide us a chance to know the assets of our country in depth.

Project Development : 

         The first challenge that we faced was the one called Requirements Engineering. We spent next week in listing down the overall requirements of this project that turn out to be:

• Prerequisite knowledge of VISUAL BASIC'06, in order to form different modules,
• PL/SQL syntax to manage databases in Oracle,
• Further to link Oracle database to the different modules of VB'O6 and
• The most important was the expected output as a result of these considering the limitations of scope in order to complete the project within the allocated deadline(initially 1 month).

          Hence we opted to go by RAD model of project development. So, we divided India as per four directions. I opted to go by North. We decided to form at most 9 modules using VB'06 and its attributes for front end(user end), each by further dividing each part in four sub-parts having description of four most famous tourist places.

It took approx. 3-4 weeks to complete, though we decided to follow RAD model, designing the modules turn  out to be the INCREMENTAL model.

     Finally, we left out with the challenge to link all the modules to the Oracle database(i.e Back end) and that we did in the extension provided in deadline.

Challenges faced : 

• Once scope of Project is defined improperly, it leads to unnecessary delay and misunderstandings among team members,
• We should decide the extensions(like client-server format etc.) while requirements engineering, so that the modules could be designed in order to accomodate extensions or further modifications.

Key Learnings :

• Learnt to manage databases using Oracle and develop modules in VB'06 with client - server approach in order to link it to the available databases,
• Got to know the benefits of team work along with the difficulties that are to be faced in team works and ways to handle them.
• Learnt the importance of time and resource management while planning any task.