On the 19th of November, our contest winners met again. However, this time was different.

Contrary to their first physical meeting, now their every-day work has been revolutionised by the UCO Platform! SMEs and start-ups have finally reaped-off the benefits of the Platform!

During the physical meeting, they presented their main achievements with UCO Platform and the main benefits Platform has brought to their business:

• less time needed to move from idea to the market;
• quick deployment of the new instances;
• reduced costs;
• easier avoidance of vendor lock-in;
• reduced costs;
• increased security;
• high cloud service availability.

Presentations of the SMEs were followed by the final discussion between the participants and project consortium.

Curious how the day went?

See our Final Demo VIDEO HERE!

19 November 2019
Avenue de la Joyeuse Entrée 1, Brussels

It is estimated that among European digital SMEs, on average, each of them uses up to 6 different clouds.

However, deployment in multi-cloud environment raises the complexity of monitoring and management: such as designing secure software and ensuring customer data as well as ensuring resource scaling (elasticity). It results in higher costs and delayed time-to-market which might have a particularly harmful impact on SMEs and start-ups.
Therefore, research and innovation project UNICORN has developed the platform for cloud applications’ development which simplifies cloud application design process, shortens its time, increases developer’s productivity and ensures privacy and security requirements.

UNICORN Final Demo event for SMEs introduces Platform’s benefits to the companies. SMEs and start-ups will share their first-hand experience and business benefits they encountered when using the Platform. Meanwhile, our research team will demonstrate the innovative, interoperable and portable language for composing high-level analytic insights in the context of microservices.

Draft agenda:

14:15 – 14:40 Registration & Coffee

14:40-15:00 Welcome & UNICORN Project Presentation
Spiros Alexakis, CAS

15:00 – 15:30 Hear from your peers: start-up experience using UCO Platform
Pedro J. Molina, Metadev
Andreas Menychtas, BioAssist
Presentation of achieved results when using UCO Platform

15:30 – 15:45 Analytic insights for monitoring and auto-scaling microservices: we learned to do it easily!
Zacharias Georgiou (University of Cyprus)
Presentation of innovative interoperable and portable language for composing high-level analytic insights in the context of microservices.

15:45 – 16:00 Hear from your peers Pt.2: SME experience
Konstantinos Theodosiou (Ubitech) 
Presentation of Maestro product which utilises UCO Platform

16:00 – 16:15 Q&A session

16:15-17:00 Networking drinks

For the registration, please click HERE.

One month and ten days after the first initial meeting in Alicante, Unicorn partners and winners have been very busy. To begin with, the winners have had their Pre-report completed & validated by one of the unicorn experts. In their pre-reports, the winners have elaborated on how and with which means they plan to test and validate the Unicorn platform.

Using these reports partners prepared individual pages for the winners with infographics containing which indicators each winner is planning to measure.

What is more, a few days ago the Unicorn winners got together -virtually- this time for their first online workshop. During the workshop, the status of the platform was discussed, including updates on the UI, bug fixing and the IaaS infrastructure upgrade. Following that the partners held a QnA session containing questions that were sent in advance. Last on the agenda, partners and Unicorn winners discussed some requests and issues that came up from the one month of validation.

What is next you are wondering? A 1-to-1 virtual workshop, from 24th June and 5th July. Where a 1-hour Skype session between the winner and the associated technical unicorn expert will take place. During the session, the progress in the implementation of the validation prototypes/products with UNICORN will be discussed.

Stay tuned for more updates!

The UNICORN project intends to develop a solution to simplify the design, deployment and management of secure and flexible multi-cloud services. The project results will be transferred into a CEN Workshop Agreement (CWA) titled “Analytics Insights and Scaling Policies for Microservices”. Standardization is considered as an important and relevant topic by the project consortium. It is as an important tool to transfer knowledge from research into practice. The overall goal of the envisaged CEN Workshop Agreement is to give guidelines for platform-agnostic elasticity management of elastic-by-design microservices.

The CWA kick-off meeting took place in November 2018 in Athens. The Workshop participants discussed the structure of the document and agreed on future actions. This led to a first draft, which was presented at the UNICORN Plenary meeting in Alicante in April 2019. The first draft is an early version of the CWA, which will be enhanced by the end of May 2019. After completing the draft, the open commenting phase will be launched by CEN-CENELEC Management Centre (CCMC) for a duration of two months. This enables the public to submit technical comments to the draft CWA. After the commenting the phase is over, the Workshop participants will collect the comments and discuss whether they should be accepted or rejected in order to proceed with the finalization of the CWA. The CWA will be published by the end of 2019.

Partners from Cloud Incubator HUB attended Murcia DevOps meeting in the Spanish city of Murcia. At the meeting our partners explained how the Unicorn platform works  by showing a demo version for the audience to engage with. Additionally, and just days before the deadline of the UNICORN Validation Contest, they also presented the contest and what it has to offer to fellow developers at the meeting encouraging them to participate.

Murcia DevOps, is a monthly meeting held by a group of software developers, system administrators and other ICT professionals interested in the DevOps culture and the technologies with which it is related.