Commercial Use of WS-PGRADE/gUSE - Science Gateways for Distributed Computing Infrastructures - page 262

submitting jobs to a local cluster served by Condor/NMI (NSF Middleware Ini-
tiative) (Thain 2005) job submission middleware. Within SCI-BUS, the portal has
been integrated with the services provided by WS-PGRADE/gUSE to extend the
existing job submission capabilities towards a more flexible, user-centric cloud
infrastructure. The major motivation when moving to cloud is that the Gateway will
be operated as a Software as a Service (SaaS) serving software developers. In the
case of Build and Test Portal, the SaaS or software delivery means

that the software and its associated data are hosted locally. At the same time, the
build servers, on which the tests and builds run, are dynamically hosted and dis-
tributed in the cloud. The Build and Test Portal is accessed by users via a web
browser. The targeted users of this service are small and medium-sized IT com-
panies and individual, freelancer programmers who do not want to operate their
own build and test infrastructure. For these professionals, the cloud approach is
probably the most cost ef

“ on-demand ”

cient method to use, maintain and upgrade.
Slightly similar continuous build automation tools are available both on the
open-source and on the commercial markets. On the one hand, open source solu-
tions are CruiseControl ( http://cruisecontrol.sourceforge.net/ ) for Java and.NET,
and Jenkins ( http://jenkins-ci.org/ ) , the extensible continuous integration engine.
Regarding commercial products, Microsoft

'

s Team Foundation Server ( http://msdn.
microsoft.com/en-us/vstudio/ff637362.aspx ) and JetBrain

'

s Team City ( http://
www.jetbrains.com/teamcity ) are the most popular ones. However, the market
potential of the Build and Test-portal is in its intuitive user interface and the
dynamic utilization of cloud computing resources.

19.2.1 Role of WS-PGRADE/gUSE

gUSE is an open-source science gateway framework, empowered with a workflow
toolset and giving users to convenient and easy access to various DCIs, including
cloud infrastructures. In this respect, gUSE was a good candidate for the Build and
Test Portal when implementing it as a service in the cloud.
The Build and Test Portal submits only jobs to the build servers As a conse-
quence, the workflow capabilities of WS-PGRADE/gUSE are currently not utilised.
Job submission is via the Remote API to cloud computing resources through the
DCI Bridge and CloudBroker components. The Remote API is a convenient way to
manage workflows (in this case, only one-job workflows) between the local envi-
ronment and cloud infrastructures for various reasons. Among them, it allows
running and managing workflows from custom user interfaces, in this case from the
Build and Test Portal. The API exposes gUSE workflow (job) submission services
through a simple web service interface. In that way it integrates well with the
existing GWT-based portal implementation.
Please note that the terms workflow and job are sometimes used interchangeably.
The reason is that the Build and Test portal operates with jobs. At the same time,
the Remote API works with workflows. In order to facilitate the advantages of