ABSTRACT
Cloud computing is a new model for enabling ubiquitous and on-demand access to a shared pool of configurable computing resources such as computer networks, applications, and services. Nowadays, more and more software systems and services use the cloud computing technology to achieve large-scale, rapid, and flexible integration and deployment. To take full advantage of cloud computing technology in integration and deployment of remote laboratory (RL) systems on a large scale, a novel Remote Laboratory as a Service framework (RLaaS-Frame) is proposed. In this chapter, the RLaaS-Frame is designed for the rapid and flexible integration and deployment of RL systems. To implement the RLaaS-Frame, the OpenStack software is integrated with Kubernetes, which is an open-source platform for automating deployment of application containers, by using Murano, which is an application catalog for publishing various cloud-ready applications. Murano introduces catalogs to deploy RL applications in Kubernetes with Docker containers. To illustrate the effectiveness of this novel cloud-computing-based framework, an RL system is implemented as a pilot case successfully to provide RL services for end users. With the cloud computing technology, RLaaS-Frame has the capability to accelerate the adoption of RL technology to benefit online education, academic research, and industrial applications.
