A Mobile App for Openstack-Based Clouds

OpenStack is a free and widely adopted open source software solution for Cloud infrastructures with specific focus on Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) platforms. The National eResearch Collaboration Tools and Resources (NeCTAR) project (https://dashboard.rc.nectar.org.au) offers a national research Cloud across Australia providing flexible and scalable computing resources to all Australian researchers that is based upon OpenStack. OpenStack offers a range of core components and capabilities for establishing and managing Cloud resources. At present, users access the NeCTAR Research Cloud through either the NeCTAR dashboard or through OpenStack command line clients. This paper presents an implementation of a mobile application (for both the iPhone and Android phones) that enables researchers to access and manage their computational and storage resources on the NeCTAR Cloud directly. This allows researchers to easily manage their Cloud resources on-the-go. This paper discusses the design and realization of the mobile app and the core capabilities it offers.