Supporting Innovation in an Internet of Services

A multi-site cloud facility for applications, services and systems research and experimentation

The Internet of Services (IoS) is at the heart of Europe’s vision for the Future Internet.  Value-added connections between people, objects, infrastructure and content will all be made possible by new service technologies.  Development of successful services can be challenging and testbeds are an essential part to allow technical and socio-economic impact to be explored. This is especially true for disruptive technologies that impact current Internet business models.  With the complexity of infrastructure and usage scenarios increasing the development of testbeds are increasingly challenging and costly. A new approach for European test bed provision is needed that moves away from project and industry specific facilities to general purpose, reusable, low-cost testing and experimentation services.

The BonFIRE (Building service testbeds for Future Internet Research and Experimentation) Project is providing a state-of-the art multi-site cloud facility for applications, services and systems research in the Internet of Services community. The facility will give researchers access to large-scale virtualised compute, storage and networking resources with the necessary control and monitoring services for detailed experimentation of their systems and applications. The facility will allow the evaluation of cross-cutting effects of converged service and network infrastructures and the assessment of socio-economic impact.

The cloud Service, Platform, Infrastructure (SPI) layered architectural model underpins the BonFIRE offer. Testbeds will be provided using IaaS delivery. Easy to use methodologies, tools and services will support cloud federation, virtual machine management, service modelling, experiment lifecycle management, quality of service monitoring and analytics. Some testbed sites will be federated where multi-site, multi-domain experiments are need. The BonFIRE project will drive excellence in European services research.

Through collaboration and partnerships with test bed providers, and experimenters, BonFIRE will ensure that Europe remains at the forefront service technologies.

IoS experimenters are often faced with the question "Why should I use an external facility instead of creating my own testbed?" This sort of question is riddled with pre-conceptions and concerns about quality, reliability, loss of control and accountability when using outsourced services. But BonFIRE is different. The facility is being built by service providers for service providers and this fact means that we are deeply aware of the concerns and how to address them.

BonFIRE is about trusted partnership and collaboration: BonFIRE will bring together experimenters and test bed providers working on innovative service technologies. The BonFIRE consortium consists of leading service providers and cloud technologists who will work in consultation with users of the facility to ensure strong experiment hypothesis, design and execution

BonFIRE is about state-of-the-art cloud technologies: BonFIRE does not replace current public cloud offerings but does offer something different. BonFIRE provide experiments access to heterogeneous cloud resources with advanced low-level control and monitoring APIs and the ability to scale beyond current research project testbeds. In addition, the experimental process is supported by tools that ensure results are verifiable and reproducible.

BonFIRE is about efficiency: The BonFIRE project will reduce costs allowing researchers to achieve more by focusing  on innovation rather than testbed operations. BonFIRE is about innovative experiments. BonFIRE’s success is related to the success of innovative experiments.  It’s in BonFIRE's interests to make this happen and to serve the IoS research community. BonFIRE will work closely with you to achieve this.