Definition of Infrastructure Services

Infrastructure as a service is a topic of increasing interest, both in offerings from commercial providers and in research projects. It is also an important constituent of the NESSI Open Framework. The problem addressed here is to identify a set of infrastructure services that will be attractive to users and feasible for providers to offer.
There is a wide range of possible infrastructure services, including network connectivity, storage, processing and execution environments for software components and virtual machines. Provision of software appliances for remote deployment, encapsulating complex functionality such as databases and application servers may be of interest. Desktop and application virtualisation may also be considered. Combinations of these into more integrated environments will also be of interest. In addition to generic functionality, specialised application requirements for features such as high bandwidth, high data throughput and low response time (latency) will be considered. Optimisations for specific workloads and application topologies may also be included.
There are existing infrastructure service offerings which will be taken into account – including some from Amazon, Google, IBM and others. These provide concrete examples of services that NEXOF-RA should be able to accommodate. In addition, a number of research projects have views on how infrastructure might be offered as services. This investigation topic will attempt to develop a unified view and to extract an initial set of infrastructure service characteristics which are expected to be common to sets of services. These will include appropriate service metrics and their units, which will be needed to support comparison of similar services from different providers as well as to ensure that the consumer and provider of a single service can have a consistent view of the quality of the service provided.

The scope of this topic is a set of services that expose low-level ICT functionality. These can be considered the baseline environment on which the rest of the NESSI Open Framework is built. It focuses on describing a set of infrastructure services that can be used to motivate and validate specifications (to be developed later) which will enable machine-readable descriptions of the functional and non-functional characteristics of infrastructure services. Formal specification (of, for example, service and deployment descriptors)   is out of scope at present but, for example, requirements for common information models are in scope.