Produce a project plan and an interim description of the project development

Problem 1. "Northern Lights Alert Service". The sun is currently in a period of maximum activity. Sites such as NASA, Royal Observatory of Belgium and others publish information about events on the sun, which are precursors of aurorae, these include flares and coronal mass ejections. The project involves building a cloud-based service that can gather information published by some of these sites and can send alerts to the mobile phones of subscribers. As an extension you could send images of these solar events to the users mobile phones, possibly by downloading the images to your cloud service or else some other more efficient method that may occur to you.

Problem 2. Build a cloud gateway. This would be a web service based application that could store information about how often a user has accessed cloud resources and how much resource s/he has spent. The gateway would be a point where machine images (AMIs) could be launched or it could just be place where a user could record and store details of how much usage they had accumulated. The challenge of this project is to see how much the gateway can assist the user in this critical bookkeeping, for example by issuing warnings about usage coming up to a threshold value. Further extensions would permit multiple users to access the service.

Problem 3. Business models for the cloud. In the course we have given a simple example of an Excel based calculator that can compare the costs of providing a database server in house versus hosted in the cloud. Our model is very simple and basic and does not really allow for costs for support, networking and maintenance into account. It also does not allow for comparisons between different cloud providers. The task of this project is to extend the calculator into a more comprehensive model and in particular into one that can be updated as Amazon and other Cloud providers update their prices. For an extension you could consider hosting the calculator as a Web Service.

Problem 4. Develop a taxonomy for Grid and Cloud Computing. There is a wide range of systems describing themselves as Clouds or Grids. A simple taxonomy is provided by the concepts of SaaS, PaaS and IaaS that you learnt in the course but there is much more that could be done to produce a taxonomy that would help prospective users of these system to understand what they are offering and how they are distinguished in terms of economic model, security model, geographical access etc.. As a further extension of this project you could consider formalizing your model, if you know any suitable languages such as the Web Ontology Language (OWL), or any other means of providing a formal description of your taxonomy.