Happy New Year from Chameleon!
We’ve had a fantastic 2015 building the testbed -- many thanks to the Chameleon community for your patience and support!
The last year focused on making a large-scale, highly reconfigurable testbed for Computer Science possible. A few highlights:
- The release of Technology Preview of our bare metal reconfiguration capabilities (CHI) in early April,
- Public release of CHI on new hardware in late July,
- Making a new OpenStack KVM cloud available in September.
As of today Chameleon has 500+ users working on almost 150 exciting projects ranging from low-level operating systems research to innovative projects in cloud computing education. The more we learn about your individual activities the more impressed we are with the depth and breadth of all the exciting projects going on!
One major addition in last quarter of 2015 was the introduction of identity federation with GENI. GENI users can now use their GENI credentials to log into the Chameleon portal. This allows them to access Chameleon without having to register a separate account, via a a shared GENI federation project with enough SUs to try out Chameleon. GENI users can of course also create individual Chameleon projects dedicated to their research.
In 2016 our goal is to take Computer Science research on Chameleon from possible to easy. Here is a preview of some of the exciting features we are planning for the first months of 2016:
- Chameleon appliances. We will improve ways of creating and sharing Chameleon appliances, i.e., the bare metal images that you deploy to create your environment. We will provide better ways of snapshotting appliances, developing complex appliances, and build an appliance marketplace where users will be able to publish their own appliances and discover appliances contributed by others. In fact, to celebrate New Year’s, we just released a small preview of the marketplace with some initial appliances.
- Experiment management. We will provide tools that will allow you to automate your experiments so that they are easy to deploy and manage even when you are not around. This will also make it easy to repeat them as many times as needed – or to pass them on to somebody else in your group or outside of it to reproduce.
- Deeper reconfiguration and better monitoring. We will provide deeper reconfiguration and monitoring capabilities making it easier for users working on operating systems research or otherwise requiring deep reconfigurability.
Many more ideas are coming down the pipe and we will keep you posted – in the meantime, please share your suggestions with us and tell us how we can help you use Chameleon better. All in all, we are looking forward to another exciting year!