Cloud Services presented in the Marketplace

Cloud services are important tools for new smart technologies. In the SMART4ALL project they are necessary to use for creating the expected Marketplace facilities. Therefore, the main goal of Task 5.3 is the development and support of access to cloud services in the Marketplace in order to perform the SMART4ALL experiments with the prepared applications.

The performed work mainly consisted of the preparation and provision of a tutorial for both open and proprietary cloud services in the Marketplace, including the assessment of their features (advantages and potential disadvantages) of various mature open and proprietary cloud services related to the SMART4ALL technologies, and the preparation of sets of guidelines for the use of open and proprietary cloud services. Information sets on various selected open and proprietary cloud services are also prepared together with illustrative applications.

Among open cloud services the following were considered and analyzed: Nextcloud, OpenStack, CloudStack, Eucalyptus, OpenNebula, OpenShift (OKD). In addition, the following proprietary cloud services were analyzed: Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud, IBM Cloud, Oracle Cloud.

Open cloud services are more flexible in the management and are more customizable with better and varied control panels. Users can have strong contribution to the software development. However, although the initial costs are lower than the license costs of the proprietary ones, there are some hidden costs of: installation, support, fixes, and upgrades. On the other hand, proprietary cloud services have some important benefits such as quality and stability.

As the result of the prepared analysis, the Nextcloud technology is recommended as the main Marketplace cloud service with the following facilities: an embedded application for on-line editing of office files, viewing PDF files without the need to download them [1], a tool for analyzing data obtained from the GPS modules, a tool for visualizing transportation routes based on the collected coordinates ([2], [3]). Moreover, the Marketplace should provide a possibility of performing calculations in the cloud using the whole SMART4ALL computing infrastructure.