4CaaSt - Building the PaaS Cloud of the Future

The 4CaaSt project aims to create an advanced PaaS Cloud platform which supports the optimized and elastic hosting of Internet-scale multi-tier applications. 4CaaSt embeds all the necessary features, easing programming of rich applications and enabling the creation of a true business ecosystem where applications coming from different providers can be tailored to different users, mashed up and traded together.


== Reducing the time-to-market ==
Cloud computing is essentially changing the way services are built, provided and consumed. Despite simple access to Clouds, building elastic services is still an elitist domain and proprietary technologies are an entry barrier especially to SMEs and consequently, it remains largely within the domain of established players.
The project will bring significant benefits to the European economy. It will provide an easy to use Infrastructure for a More Competitive Environment, greatly simplifying design and delivery of tailored services and compositions.
Shifting focus from technology to business aspects will accelerate the Massive Uptake of Value Added Services taking full advantage of Telco communication paradigms.
Thus, 4CaaSt ultimately contributes to the Future Internet by its ability to serve the service demands of tomorrow in a highly efficient and scalable manner. It brings Europe's Telco industries the unique opportunity to expand their traditional business towards integrated IT/Telco service platforms as well as allowing Cloud Platform providers to expand the scope of the way the platform can be utilised.

=== The Vision ===
The 4CaaSt platform brings a unique value proposition, translated into the following points:
- The highest level of abstraction regarding application hosting, hiding complexity while providing the most efficient solution.
- A complete set of built-in programming libraries and common facilities beyond what is offered by state-of-the-art PaaS Clouds, easing development of killer applications.
- Convergence between IT and Telecommunications.
- The most attractive business ecosystem support facilities, to promote and monetize applications as well as create an active community of users and developers.
- The necessary tools to monitor execution and manage lifecycle of applications.

Overall, the project will bring significant benefits to the European economy via a greatly simplified design and delivery model for services and service compositions. The developed platform will lead to the establishment of new and highly dynamic and innovative service ecosystems.
The platform should enable the involved parties to focus on their individual business. Providers of services and applications should be able to focus on the development and offering of highly demanded services. Consumers should be able to easily find and consume services. Service aggregators should be able to build and offer demanded service composites. Cloud Providers should be able to focus on the efficient platform operation with value added lifecycle processes and marketing features.


== The Model ==
In the 4CaaSt model, Applications are composed by Application Components which are the building blocks (i.e. a n-tier application with a web portal and backend business components, or an orchestration program) that will be deployed and executed among different Platforms. A Platform is a suite of Platform Technologies: Native Cloud Technologies (Context, Publish/Subscribe, Network, Data Store and Mashup as a Service) and Immigrant Cloud Technologies (Database, Application Servers, Composition Frameworks, and Integration Technologies). The Platform will also provide eMarketplace capabilities for exposing, sharing and combining services creating an open ecosystem.
A 4CaaSt-compliant Cloud will provide a web portal that enables Application Providers to self-service by using an Application Blueprint descriptor that will determine the Application Components and the required Platform Technologies, SLAs, Business Rules, Backup and the exported and required services. Taking a given Application Blueprint, the 4CaaSt Cloud will set-up the optimal Runtime Execution Containers (VM running a stack of OS, runtime containers, technology libraries and services) that will host different Application Components. For the same platform technology different products would be available but they will be provisioned in the same way using standard interfaces. The required infrastructure resources will be provided by an IaaS (e.g. RESERVOIR) and NaaS enablers.
The 4CaaSt Cloud platform will automatically distribute Application Components among the available Runtime Execution Containers. Depending on the monitored SLAs the platform could decide to scale the applications providing more/less Runtime Containers and redistributing the Application Components.