The Management of Data Information, and Knowledge Group (MaDgIK) at the University of Athens focuses on several research areas, such as Database and Information Systems, Distributed Systems, Query Optimization, and Digital Libraries. During the past few years, projects within this group started offering and sharing hardware resources through a virtualized infrastructure. We eventually built our own IaaS-cloud using open source software, namely Xen, Debian and OpenNebula. However, that was not enough, since we needed custom solutions to suit our needs. At that point we called upon Eolus, the god of the winds, to blow and shape the clouds.

Eolus is our open source attempt to join the forces of OpenNebula and Java Enterprise Edition. It is far from being an end product, yet it provides functionality that serves our purposes. In short, OpenNebula is used as a management tool for virtual resources that we exploit in building higher level custom services available through a JEE application container. An advanced VM scheduler called Nefeli and a web based administration console are only a couple of such high level components we offer to users. Our success stories include undergraduate theses, researchers and European funded projects (e.g. D4Science) experimenting and exploiting cloud resources. You can have a glimpse of our efforts, released under the EUPL licence, at https://code-projects.di.uoa.gr/eolus.