Clouds of Small Things: Provisioning Infrastructure-as-a-Service from within Community Networks

Community networks offer a shared communication infrastructure where communities of citizens build and own open networks. While the IP connectivity of the networking devices is successfully achieved, the number of services and applications available from within the community network is typically small and the usage of the community network is often limited to providing Internet access to remote areas through wireless links. In this paper we propose to apply the principle of resource sharing of community networks, currently limited to the network bandwidth, to other computing resources, which leads to cloud computing in community networks. Towards this vision, we review some characteristics of community networks and identify potential scenarios for community clouds. We simulate a cloud computing infrastructure service and discuss different aspects of its performance in comparison to a commercial centralized cloud system. We note that in community clouds the computing resources are heterogeneous and less powerful, which affects the time needed to assign resources. Response time of the infrastructure service is high in community clouds even for a small number of resources since resources are distributed, but tends to get closer to that of a centralized cloud when the number of resources requested increases. Our initial results suggest that the performance of the community clouds highly depends on the community network conditions, but has some potential for improvement with network-aware cloud services. The main strength compared to commercial cloud services, however, is that community cloud services hosted on community-owned resources will follow the principles of community network and will be neutral and open

A Review on Various Energy Efficient Techniques in Cloud Environment

Cloud computing is web based mostly development and use of engineering. it is a mode of computing within which dynamically scalable and sometimes virtualized resources are provided as a service over the web. Users needn't have data of, experience in, or management over the technology infrastructure "in the cloud" that supports them. programming is one of the core steps to with efficiency exploit the capabilities of heterogeneous computing systems. On cloud computing platform, load equalisation of the whole system will be dynamically handled by using virtualization technology through that it becomes potential to remap virtual machine and physical resources in step with the modification in load. However, so as to boost performance, the virtual machines ought to totally utilize its resources and services by adapting to computing setting dynamically. The load balancing with correct allocation of resources should be bonded so as to boost resource utility and energy efficiency

Towards a Swiss National Research Infrastructure

In this position paper we describe the current status and plans for a Swiss National Research Infrastructure. Swiss academic and research institutions are very autonomous. While being loosely coupled, they do not rely on any centralized management entities. Therefore, a coordinated national research infrastructure can only be established by federating the various resources available locally at the individual institutions. The Swiss Multi-Science Computing Grid and the Swiss Academic Compute Cloud projects serve already a large number of diverse user communities. These projects also allow us to test the operational setup of such a heterogeneous federated infrastructure

The Computing Fleet: Managing Microservices-based Applications on the Computing Continuum

In this paper we propose the concept of "Computing Fleet" as an abstract entity representing groups of heterogeneous, distributed, and dynamic infrastructure elements across the Computing Continuum (covering the Edge- Fog-Cloud computing paradigms). In the process of using fleets, stakeholders obtain the virtual resources from the fleet, deploy software applications to the fleet, and control the data flow, without worrying about what devices are used in the fleet, how they are connected, and when they may join and exit the fleet. We propose a three-layer reference architecture for the Computing Fleet capturing key elements for designing and operating fleets. We discuss key aspects related to the management of microservices-based applications on the Computing Fleet and propose an approach for deployment and orchestration of microservices-based applications on fleets. Furthermore, we present a software prototype as a preliminary evaluation of the Computing Fleet concept in a concrete Cloud- Edge scenario related to remote patients monitoring.acceptedVersio

The ATLAS Workflow Management System Evolution in the LHC Run3 and towards the High-Luminosity LHC era

The ATLAS experiment has 18+ years of experience using workload management systems to deploy and develop workflows to process and to simulate data on the distributed computing infrastructure. Simulation, processing and analysis of LHC experiment data require the coordinated work of heterogeneous computing resources. In particular, the ATLAS experiment utilizes the resources of 250 computing centers worldwide, the power of supercomputing centres, and national, academic and commercial cloud computing resources. In this contribution, we present new techniques for cost-effectively improving efficiency introduced in workflow management system software. The evolution from a mesh framework to new types of computing facilities such as cloud and HPCs is described, as well as new types of production and analysis workflows

Serverless computing for the Internet of Things

Cloud-based services have evolved significantly over the years. Cloud computing models such as IaaS, PaaS and SaaS are serving as an alternative to traditional in-house infrastructure-based approach. Furthermore, serverless computing is a cloud computing model for ephemeral, stateless and event-driven applications that scale up and down instantly. In contrast to the infinite resources of cloud computing, the Internet of Things is the network of resource-constrained, heterogeneous and intelligent devices that generate a significant amount of data. Due to the resource-constrained nature of IoT devices, cloud resources are used to process data generated by IoT devices. However, data processing in the cloud also has few limitations such as latency and privacy concerns. These limitations arise a requirement of local processing of data generated by IoT devices. A serverless platform can be deployed on a cluster of IoT devices using software containers to enable local processing of the sensor data. This work proposes a hybrid multi-layered architecture that not only establishes the possibility of local processing of sensor data but also considers the issues such as heterogeneity, resource constraint nature of IoT devices. We use software containers, and multi-layered architecture to provide the high availability and fault tolerance in our proposed solution

CloudEx: a novel cloud-based task execution framework

In recent years cloud computing has seen steady adoption due to its unique features such as computing resource elasticity, fault-tolerance and utility billing. Cloud computing Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) enables unique architectures that can dynamically scale and configure computing resources from a catalogue of available features. In addition to provisioning long running homogeneous clusters of Virtual Machines (VMs), it can also be feasible to provision ephemeral and heterogeneous per-job VMs. This is made possible due to the reduced VM startup time and per- minute billing for cloud VMs. In this paper we design and implement CloudEx, a generic and novel framework for executing jobs on public clouds by leveraging the Google Cloud Platform. CloudEx enables users to split jobs into a sequence of smaller tasks that can be distributed using Bin Packing or user-defined algorithm. Additionally, users can specify the VM specification per job or per task, CloudEx then provisions the required VMs, coordinates the job execution and terminates these VMs once the job is completed

CloudOps: Towards the Operationalization of the Cloud Continuum: Concepts, Challenges and a Reference Framework

The current trend of developing highly distributed, context aware, heterogeneous computing intense and data-sensitive applications is changing the boundaries of cloud computing. Encouraged by the growing IoT paradigm and with flexible edge devices available, an ecosystem of a combination of resources, ranging from high density compute and storage to very lightweight embedded computers running on batteries or solar power, is available for DevOps teams from what is known as the Cloud Continuum. In this dynamic context, manageability is key, as well as controlled operations and resources monitoring for handling anomalies. Unfortunately, the operation and management of such heterogeneous computing environments (including edge, cloud and network services) is complex and operators face challenges such as the continuous optimization and autonomous (re-)deployment of context-aware stateless and stateful applications where, however, they must ensure service continuity while anticipating potential failures in the underlying infrastructure. In this paper, we propose a novel CloudOps workflow (extending the traditional DevOps pipeline), proposing techniques and methods for applications’ operators to fully embrace the possibilities of the Cloud Continuum. Our approach will support DevOps teams in the operationalization of the Cloud Continuum. Secondly, we provide an extensive explanation of the scope, possibilities and future of the CloudOps.This research was funded by the European project PIACERE (Horizon 2020 Research and Innovation Programme, under grant agreement No. 101000162)