BonFIRE version 3.0 has been released, bringing many new features and improvements to the experimenters in BonFIRE. The main additions of this release are described below.

Timestamps for internal processes

In its quest for advanced monitoring, BonFIRE now provides the timestamps of specific experiment events to the experimenters. Triggered by specific experimenter requirements, the timestamps of VM requests going through the experiment manager are logged and served via HTTP. Check out the documentation page for more information.

Access to on-request resources

In addition to our dedicated sites, the Inria BonFIRE site now provides access to more computational resources on request. Importantly, the VM host that is reserved on request is exclusively available to the experimenter for the duration of the reservation, protecting the experiment from some of the multi-tenancy issues normally associated with Cloud environments. More information is available from our documentation page.

Choose your site, choose your host

BonFIRE has always allowed its users to specify which site they want their VMs to run on. From Release 3, all BonFIRE interfaces allow to also specify on which specific host to deploy that VM. This is essential for using on-request resources, but also provides fine-grained control of your experiment. For more information, please see our documentation page.

Spec it as you please

Central to VM instantiation is the notion of instance types; the combination of CPUs and RAM available to the VM created. BonFIRE lets you control the make up of your VM by allowing to specify any such combination. Although combinations exceeding the available resources will not be instantiated, this feature is another example of BonFIRE functionality particularly conducive to experimentation. This is how it's done.

Access to site and VM logs

Wondering on which host to deploy your VM? Want to know what custom type the host can accommodate? In order to foster experimentation, BonFIRE provides advanced observability of its systems. The BonFIRE sites publish hypervisor information about the state of the site hosts. Additionally, in-depth timestamped information of the status changes of each VMs is available; easily accessible from the VM log linked to on the VM page on the BonFIRE Portal.

Support for OVF

The BonFIRE Experiment Manager now supports the Open Virtualisation Format (OVF). BonFIRE has extended OVF with new components and attributes to support its advanced features. The list is available from our documentation page.

Command-line interface tools

We have added another client tool to interact with the BonFIRE API. The BonFIRE CLI tools are meant to provide users with a way to interact with the BonFIRE API from a command line interface. Information on how to use these powerful mechanisms is available from our documentation.

Background network traffic emulation

The BonFIRE Virtual Wall testbed supports configurable networks. New to Release 3 is the ability to also introduce background traffic on a user-specified network link. Please consult our user documentation for more information.

Rule-based elasticity as a service

BonFIRE has always allowed experimenters to increase or decrease the number of VMs in their experiment at runtime. New in Release 3 is the ability to specify rules to automatically scale the number of VMs up or down according to monitoring information. The Elasticity as a Service is described in more detail in our online documentation.