BonFIRE - Open Access

BonFIRE enables developers to research new, faster, cheaper or more flexible ways of running applications with new business models. SMEs and researchers can test different cloud scenarios, such as cloud bursting and hybrid clouds across BonFIRE's 5 European sites. Throughout 2014, BonFIRE is offering its multi-site cloud infrastructure for free to SMEs and researchers for testing and experimentation of cloud-based applications, services and systems.

What you get: BonFIRE offers advanced services and tools for research includes large-scale, heterogeneous and virtualised compute, storage and networking resources. - Full control of your resource deployment. In-depth monitoring and logging of physical and virtual resources. Advanced doud and network features. Ease of use experimentation.

How to get involved: With free access for SMEs and researchers throughout 2014, all you need is an idea for testing and experimentation that can benefit from BonFIRE. Frustrated with black-box computation? Constrained by the size of your experimentation cluster? Let BonFIRE help!

BonFIRE tutorial: short tutorial of some of the things you might do when you first get access to BonFIRE. This tutorial covers the basics of setting up an experiment, deploying compute resources (VMs) and using the monitoring system.

Advances on the horizon: ECO₂ Clouds is a research project is investigating strategies to ensure the effective application deployment on the cloud infrastructure and reduce  resulting energy consumption and CO₂ emissions. As part of its drive towards innovating cloud service delivery, it is integrating carbon-aware mechanisms into the BonFIRE test facility in order to test, validate and optimise the eco-metrics, models and algorithms developed, and therefore improve the FIRE offering. ECO₂ Clouds  is funded through the European FIRE programme and runs from October 2012-September 2014.

More info about BonFIRE: The BonFIRE cloud facility is based on an infrastructure-as-a-service delivery model with guidelines, policies, and best practices for experimentation. It uses a federated, multi-platform approach with interconnection and interoperation across novel service and networking testbeds. Advanced services include: cloud federation, virtual machine management, service modelling, service lifecycle management, service level agreements, quality of service monitoring and analytics. BonFIRE also offers innovative ways to describe, deploy, manage, execute, measure and remove experiments: uniform test description and deployment descriptors for all scenarios, including cross-cutting tests, federation of cloud resources in different administrative domains that provide BonFIRE with physical resources, and user-friendly interfaces at the facility entry point.

Funding information: With funding from the European Commission for the period June 2010 to December 2013, BonFIRE has ensured continuation by establishing the BonFIRE Foundation with free access to SMEs and researchers throughout 2014.  The Foundation will be funded by its core members. Full membership is based on agreements with testbed providers, integrators, and partners providing practical support. Other partners will retain links as associates.

Discover more in the FIRE Brochure, March 2014. Got an iPad? Download the iBook version (185 MB, downloading may take some time), developed by the FORGE project, winner of the best poster at the Future Internet Assemby 2014, Athens.