Management and Service-aware Networking Architectures (MANA) for Future Internet Position Paper: System Functions, Capabilities and Requirements

Future Internet (FI) research and development threads have recently been gaining momentum all over the world and as such the international race to create a new generation Internet is in full swing: GENI, Asia Future Internet, Future Internet Forum Korea, European Union Future Internet Assembly (FIA). This is a position paper identifying the research orientation with a time horizon of 10 years, together with the key challenges for the capabilities in the Management and Service-aware Networking Architectures (MANA) part of the Future Internet (FI) allowing for parallel and federated Internet(s)

Agnostic cloud services with kubernetes

Dissertação para obtenção do Grau de Mestre em Engenharia Informática e de ComputadoresA computação na nuvem é frequentemente associada a restrições de dependência de fornecedor (Vendor Lock-In), motivado pelas diferentes tecnologias e implementações proprietárias que cada fornecedor de serviços em nuvem estabelece. Estas restrições consistem na dependência de um cliente relativamente a determinado fornecedor, o que dificulta a transição para outro fornecedor. Num contributo para uma Nuvem Agnóstica, o desafio descrito neste trabalho consiste na definição de um modelo de implantação e gestão do ciclo de vida de elementos computacionais em contexto de Nuvem. Por conseguinte, o objetivo do trabalho centra-se no desenvolvimento de um modelo que desacople a implantação e a gestão de sistemas informáticos do fornecedor de Nuvem, permitindo que sejam executados de forma agnóstica em diferentes plataformas de Nuvem. Neste âmbito, recorrer-se á a contentores, enquanto solução eficiente e padronizada de implantação de serviços computacionais em diferentes infraestruturas. Adicionalmente, pretende-se que o modelo automatize a geração de ficheiros de implantação, definindo as condições de execução do(s) serviço(s). Atualmente, as plataformas de orquestração de contentores são importantes aliados das organizações, sendo responsáveis pela gestão da implantação e configuração dos sistemas informáticos formados por múltiplos contentores. Existem diversas plataformas que surgem neste contexto, capazes de monitorizar o desempenho e controlar dinamicamente as configurações dos sistemas. Um exemplo paradigmático é a plataforma Kubernetes, que emerge como um standard aberto para serviços de Nuvem,cujo componente Cloud Controller Manager contribui para a abstração de fornecedores de Nuvem. Neste sentido, é considerada uma contribuição valiosa para atingir um modelo agnóstico de Nuvem. O sistema desenvolvido é validado através da implantação de aplicações (sistemas xi xii informáticos) contentorizadas, em múltiplos fornecedores de serviços em Nuvem, públicos ou on-premises (locais). Para este efeito, o quadro Informatics System of Systems é adotado, enquanto validador, como o modelo apropriado para estruturar e organizar os artefactos tecnológicos heterogéneos que podem ser considerados.The vendor lock-in concept represents a customer’s dependency on a particular supplier or vendor, eventually becoming unable to easily migrate to a different provider. Cloud computing is frequently associated with vendor lock-in restrictions, motivated by the proprietary technological arrangements of each provider. This work proposes an agnostic cloud provider model that addresses such challenges, focusing on the establishment of a model for deploying and managing computational services in cloud environments. Concretely, it aims to enable informatics systems to be executed agnostically on multiple cloud platforms and infrastructures, thereby decoupling them from any cloud provider. Moreover, this model intends to automate servisse deployment by defining and generating the running configurations for the services.Within this context, container technology is deemed as an efficient and standard strategy for deploying computational services across cloud providers, promoting the migration of informatics systems between vendors. Additionally, container orchestration platforms, which are becoming increasingly adopted by organizations, are essential to effectively manage the life-cycle of multi-container informatics systems by monitoring their performance, and dynamically controlling their behavior. In particular, the Kubernetes platform, an emerging open standard for cloud services, is proving to be a valuable contribution on achieving service agnostic deployment, namely with its Cloud Controller Manager mechanism, helping abstracting specific cloud providers. As validation for the proposed approach, it is intended to prove the model’s adaptability to different services and technologies supplied by heterogeneous organizations through the deployment of containerized applications (informatics systems) in multiple cloud service providers, public or on-premises. For this purpose, the Informatics System of Systems framework is adopted as a validator for structuring and organize heterogeneous technology artifacts from different suppliers.N/

Resource efficiency in container-instance clusters

This research is supported by the Amazon Web Services (AWS) Education Research Grant.Cloud computing providers have recently begun offering container instances, which provide an efficient route to application deployment within a lightweight, isolated and well-defined execution environment. Cloud providers currently offer Container Service Platforms (CSPs), which support the flexible orchestration of containerised applications. Existing CSP frameworks do not offer any form of intelligent resource scheduling: applications are usually scheduled individually,rather than taking a holistic view of all registered applications and available resources in the cloud. This can result in increased execution times for applications, resource wastage through underutilized container-instances, and a reduction in the number of applications that can be deployed, given the available resources. This paper presents a cloud-based Container Management Service(CMS) framework, which offers increased deployment density, scalability and resource efficiency for containerised applications. CMS extends the state-of-the-art by providing additional functionalities for orchestrating containerised applications by joint optimisation of sets of containerised applications and resource pool on the cloud. We evaluate CMS on a cloud-based CSP i.e., Amazon EC2 Container Management Service (ECS) and conducted extensive experiments using sets of CPU and Memory intensive containerised applications against the direct deployment strategy of Amazon ECS. The results show that CMS achieves up to 25% higher cluster utilisation and up to 2.5 times faster execution times.Postprin

Cloud resource orchestration in the multi-cloud landscape: a systematic review of existing frameworks

The number of both service providers operating in the cloud market and customers consuming cloud-based services is constantly increasing, proving that the cloud computing paradigm has successfully delivered its potential. Nevertheless, the unceasing growth of the cloud market is posing hard challenges on its participants. On the provider side, the capability of orchestrating resources in order to maximise profits without failing customers’ expectations is a matter of concern. On the customer side, the efficient resource selection from a plethora of similar services advertised by a multitude of providers is an open question. In such a multi-cloud landscape, several research initiatives advocate the employment of software frameworks (namely, cloud resource orchestration frameworks - CROFs) capable of orchestrating the heterogeneous resources offered by a multitude of cloud providers in a way that best suits the customer’s need. The objective of this paper is to provide the reader with a systematic review and comparison of the most relevant CROFs found in the literature, as well as to highlight the multi-cloud computing open issues that need to be addressed by the research community in the near future