Building a Vertical Cloud Architecture for Education
Travis Brummett, Michael Galloway · 2018
The vertical architecture proposed in this paper is known as V.I.C.E. which stands for Vertical Implementation of a Cloud for Education. It consists of a head node which will control the other nodes and handle the operations required to launch or terminate virtual machines(VMs), and five heterogeneous compute nodes on which virtual machines can be launched. The most important features of the architecture are its scalability and simplicity. A middleware is launched by the head node and gathers compute node information from a database and uses it to carry out operations. Users will access these operations through a web interface hiding most of the cloud architecture complexity. To add compute nodes one would simply attach machines to the local cloud cluster and add its information to the database on the head node making the entire architecture highly scalable. The goal of this research is to replace large costly computer labs with a vertical IaaS cloud architecture. This system would use thin clients to launch VMs from the cloud and allow students to a complete Operating System(OS) at a vastly reduced cost. More machines could also be added to the local cloud giving it the potential to support many more users.