CloudTUI-FTS: a user-friendly and powerful tool to manage Cloud Computing Platforms

Abstract

The NIST defines Cloud Computing as a model for en-abling ubiquitous network access to a shared pool of con-figurable computing resources. Thanks to the popularity of Cloud Computing and its various area of applicability, in the last years various projects have been realized for building Cloud systems (e.g., Amazon Web Services, Nimbus, OpenStack, Eucalyptus, and Microsoft Azure, just to name a few). Unfortunately, most of these projects (especially the open source ones) have some drawbacks: the user interfaces are not userfriendly, the basic tasks are complex to setup and to configure even for users with computer science skills. In this paper we present CloudTUI-FTS: a powerful and user-friendly tool able to easily interact with different Cloud platforms. In particular, with CloudTUI FTS the user can perform both basic tasks (e.g., start-up/shut-down a service) and advanced tasks (e.g., create policies and mechanisms to prevent faults and to provide service scalability). We evaluate the effectiveness of our tool on the CloudLab infrastructure.