Release of the Final DICE Framework

After a 36-months R&D collaboration, the DICE consortium is pleased to announce the final release of the open source DICE framework and its two commercial versions DICE Velocity and DICE BatchPro.

DICE delivers innovative development methods and tools to strengthen the competitiveness of small and medium European ISVs in the market of business-critical data-intensive applications. The barriers that DICE breaks are the shortage of methods to express data-aware quality requirements in model-driven development and the ability to consistently consider these requirements throughout DevOps tool-chains during quality analysis, testing, and deployment of the application. Existing methodologies and tools provide these capabilities for traditional enterprise software systems and cloud-based applications, but when it comes to increasingly popular technologies such as, e.g., Hadoop/MapReduce, Spark, Storm, or Cassandra, it was difficult before DICE to adopt a holistic quality-driven software engineering approach. DICE delivers this capability, providing a quality-driven development environment for data-intensive applications.

In particular, DICE offers a DevOps methodology and platform covering multiple aspects of the lifecycle of a Big data application. A collection of 14 tools has been created and released as open source. The tools can guide in the definition of new Big data applications or in extending existing ones. A knowledge repository has been created to help end users to explore the different features of the tools, as well as to navigate through supporting tutorials and videos.

In particular, the open source release of the DICE framework is available free of charge and offers to development and operations teams:

• An Eclipse-based IDE implementing the DICE DevOps methodology and guiding the user step-by-step through the use of cheatsheets
• A new UML profile to design data-intensive applications taking into account quality-of-service requirements and featuring privacy-by-design methods
• Quality analysis tools to simulate, verify, and optimize the application design and identify possible anti-patterns
• OASIS TOSCA-compliant deployment and orchestration on cloud VMs and containers
• Monitoring and anomaly detection tools based on the Elasticsearch-Logstash-Kibana stack
• Runtime methods for configuration optimization, testing and fault injection
• Native support for open-source Apache platforms such as Storm, Spark, Hadoop, and Cassandra.

The DICE framework is also available in two commercial versions focused on real-time applications (DICE Velocity) and batch processing system development and delivery (DICE BatchPro).

The DICE tools have been presented and are actively downloaded by a diverse group of stakeholders. Videos that illustrate cross-cutting benefits of the solution for different needs and use case scenarios are available on the DICE YouTube channel, together with tutorials on the DICE blog, as well as regular announcements on the DICE Twitter newsfeed.