Cloudy Emulation – Efficient and Scaleable Emulation-based Services: Paper - iPres 2013 - Lisbon

Emulation as a strategy for digital preservation is about to become an accepted technology for memory institutions as a method for coping a large variety of complex digital objects. Hence, the demand for ready-made and especially easy-to-use emulation services will grow. In order to provide user-friendly emulation services a scalable, distributed system model is required to be run on heterogeneous Grid or Cluster infrastructure. We propose an Emulation-as-a-Service architecture that simplifies access to preserved digital assets allowing end users to interact with the original environments running on different emulators. Ready-made emulation components provide a flexible web service API allowing for development of individual and tailored digital preservation workflows. This paper describes design and implementation of scalable emulation services as part of the bwFLA EaaS framework