The SWITCH project (Software Workbench for Interactive, Time Critical and Highly self-adaptive Cloud applications) addresses the urgent industrial need for developing and executing time critical applications in Clouds. Time critical applications such as disaster early warning, collaborative communication and live event broadcasting can only realise their expected business value when they meet critical requirements for performance and user experience. The very high requirements on network and computing services, particularly for well-tuned software architecture with sophisticated data communication optimisation, mean that development of such time critical applications is often customised to dedicated infrastructure, and system performance is difficult to maintain when infrastructure changes. This fatal weakness in the existing architecture and software tools yields very high development cost, and makes it difficult fully to utilize the virtualised, programmable services provided by networked Clouds to improve system productivity. SWITCH aims at improving the existing development and execution model of time critical applications by introducing a novel conceptual model (application-infrastructure co-programming and control model), in which application QoS/QoE, together with the programmability and controllability of the Cloud environments, can all be included in the complete lifecycle of applications. Based on this conceptual model, SWITCH provides an interactive environment for developing applications and controlling their execution, a real-time infrastructure planner for deploying applications in Clouds, and an autonomous system adaptation platform for monitoring and adapting system behaviour. The SWITCH consortium has well-balanced partners with complementary expertise from both academic and industrial backgrounds. By demonstrating the software using diverse use cases, the consortium specifically aims at exploitation of the business potential of the SWITCH results.

Virtualization is a key enabler of cloud computing that allows to run multiple virtual machines (VM) with their own software environment and applications on top of physical hardware with the promise to increase efficient usage of hardware resources at lower cost and increased elasticity. Typically VMs are created using provider-specific templates (so called VM images) that are stored in proprietary repositories which leads to provider lock-in and hinder portability or simultaneous use of multiple federated Clouds. Optimization at the level of the VM images is needed both by the Cloud applications as well as by the underlying Cloud providers for improved resource usage, speed, elasticity, redundancy, fault tolerance and other much desired Quality of Service (QoS)-related features. Critical barriers exist that prevent many users from industry, business and academia to effectively use cloud resources and virtualization environments for their computing and data processing needs. In this project we will create a novel (ENTICE) environment targeting federated Cloud infrastructures for: (i) simplifying the creation of lightweight and highly optimized VM images; (ii) automatic decomposition and distribution of VM images based on multi-objective optimization (performance, economic costs, storage size, and QoS requirements) and a knowledge collection and reasoning infrastructure, and (iii) auto-scaling of Cloud resources that supports interoperability of VMs across Cloud infrastructures without provider lock-in. We gathered an interesting selection of complementary use cases from energy management to earth observation and cloud orchestration which will be used to validate the ENTICE environment and that are provided by two SME and one industrial partners of the project.