kerub

A lightweight prototype IaaS application

Objective

The objective of this project is to demonstrate some technologies and solutions in the IaaS field. Such solutions are:

• User expectations - the user sets the service level (SLA) of the virtual resources by adding expectations
• Scheduling as an optimization/constraint enforcement problem - which means SLA defined by user is checked on each event and the required steps are taken to maintain it
• No host-cluster - this construct was created only to help human-operators to do scheduling - a bad use of payed work-hours

Architectural shift:

• No host agent
• Event driven, no poll
• NoSQL document store for VM data
• Simplicity in deployment and development
• Minimal hardware requirements

Put rare features to use:

• KSM

Despite all of the above objectives:

• it is not for architecture astronauts
• not a playground for design patterns
• must be simple and readable
• must be tested and working well

Status

Kerub is in research/development phase, however you should be able to run and use some minimalistic functionality:

• storage management with LVM, GVinum (FreeBSD) and filesystems
• storage protocols like nfs and iscsi
• KVM hypervisor
• SPICE virtual console

Tests

Some tests are included in the application, both unit and integration tests, these tests can simulate workload and run very quick (the full build is around 5 minutes on a dual-core i7 CPU). However these tests can not cover all aspects, for example we can not have a real host with an actual operating system installed on it, the command executions are faked, etc.

To fill this gap, there is another package only for tests called kerub-ext-tests. This however runs against packaged (RPM, DEB) versions of the application, sophisticated to setup, requires hypervisor hardware and software and a full run takes several hours.

There is a second separate test package for microbenchmarks: kerub-microbenchmarx This is a JMH-based benchmark collection to help tuning (mostly but only) the planner.

How to get started

git clone https://github.com/kerubistan/kerub/
cd kerub
mvn jetty:run

Open http://localhost:8080/ in your favourite browser, and you have a controller running.

First of all, you will need a few (at least one) host to work with. This can be a virtual machine in test environments if nested virtualization is enabled, or a physical server. The host needs a few software to work with:

• an operating system (see above)
• all hosts need a working ssh daemon, root must be able to connect remotely with public key authentication
• storage software, like lvm, zfs or gvinum
• storage protocols, like iscsi
• virtualization software, like kvm+qemu with libvirt (virtualbox, xen and others under development)
• monitoring and hardware discovery software, typically the ones found in any linux distribution

Kerub will find whatever is installed.

OS Packages

License