A Dynamic Data-Driven Simulation Approach for Preventing Service Level Agreement Violations in Cloud Federation

The new possibility of accessing an infinite pool of computational resources at a drastically reduced price has made cloud computing popular. With the increase in its adoption and unpredictability of workload, cloud providers are faced with the problem of meeting their service level agreement (SLA) claims as demonstrated by large vendors such as Amazon and Google. Therefore, users of cloud resources are embracing the more promising cloud federation model to ensure service guarantees. Here, users have the option of selecting between multiple cloud providers and subsequently switching to a more reliable one in the event of a provider’s inability to meet its SLA. In this paper, we propose a novel dynamic data-driven architecture capable of realising resource provision in a cloud federation with minimal SLA violations. We exemplify the approach with the aid of case studies to demonstrate its feasibility. Keywords

Exposing Issues and Challenges in Performance of Cloud Computing Services.

In current era of high performance computing, cloud computing is considered as new paradigm of ubiquitous computing. Peoples are changing their views and accordingly demand of consumer services for real world applications is getting diversified. Most of all global IT leader companies have started to consume cloud services in one or another way by putting their demands. The cloud is rapidly maturing towards its goal to satisfy federated need of consumer’s need for real-world applications. It is tried to reflect survey of current research related to open issues associated with clouds service performance with consideration of maintenance of performance and quality management and also simulates service level agreement based testing on the large scale commercial testing environment. One of the key aspect of the existing approach is it cloud environment need to achieve more flexibility to satisfy diversified users need and providers service delivery model. A collaborative system shall apply the concept of the cloud service performance testing to reduce the mitigations in cloud data and loss of the service availability and data integrity aspects

Identification of Cloud Computing Service Quality Indicators with its Expected Involvement in Cloud Computing Services and its Performance Issues

Nowadays quality of cloud computing services, along with its proper service management, is one of the most important aspects of cloud computing model. Because of that, the cloud computing system can fulfill the need of users in a better way. To fulfill the need of cloud services quality, an evaluation series of quality standards are to be considered. Some of the most important standards have been considered while others are still under identification or under development. Here a series of indicators is to be identified with an objective to guide the development of cloud service related products. Specification of high quality requirements and the evaluation of quality characteristics shall also be a part of this process. DOI: 10.17762/ijritcc2321-8169.15074

Cloud Service Level Agreements –Issues and Development

Cloud computing is a broad paradigm that has influence across major fields of human endeavour. The unique services it offers makes organisations curious about understanding the cloud and its likely benefits. The cloud offers services such as custom built applications deployed on remote systems and ready to use platforms which reduce the efforts needed to develop and deploy applications for cloud users. In addition to these, there are other services such as storage and infrastructural resources which the cloud also avails to its users. These services are usually provided to users on a pay-per-use bases, thus necessitating the need to have documented agreements in place to ensure a smooth relationship between the providers and the users. These documented agreements are referred to as Service Level Agreements (SLAs). SLAs detail the terms, conditions and service expectation of the users from their service provider in terms of availability, redundancy, uptime, cost and penalties for violations. These ensures users’ confidence in the services being offered. In this paper, the state of the art with respect to cloud SLAs is presented. The paper seeks to answer questions related of what the current trends and developments in terms of cloud SLA are and it does so by means of a review of existing literature available. This paper therefore is a survey of cloud SLAs, their issues and developmental challenges. It provides a guide for future research and is expected to benefit prospective cloud users and cloud providers alik

Service Level Agreements in Cloud Computing and Big Data

Now-a-days Most of the industries are having large volumes of data. Data has range of Tera bytes to Peta byte. Organizations are looking to handle the growth of data. Enterprises are using cloud deployments to address the big data and analytics with respect to the interaction between cloud and big data. This paper presents big data issues and research directions towards the ongoing work of processing of big data in the distributed environments

Service Level Agreements for Communication Networks: A Survey

Abstract. Information and Communication Technology (ICT) is being provided to the variety of endusers demands, thereby providing a better and improved management of services is crucial. Therefore, Service Level Agreements (SLAs) are essential and play a key role to manage the provided services among the network entities. This survey identifies the state of the art covering concepts, approaches and open problems of the SLAs establishment, deployment and management. This paper is organised in a way that the reader can access a variety of proposed SLA methods and models addressed and provides an overview of the SLA actors and elements. It also describes SLAs’ characteristics and objectives. SLAs’ existing methodologies are explained and categorised followed by the Service Quality Categories (SQD) and Quality-Based Service Descriptions (QSD). SLA modelling and architectures are discussed, and open research problems and future research directions are introduced. The establishment of a reliable, safe and QoE-aware computer networking needs a group of services that goes beyond pure networking services. Therefore, within the paper this broader set of services are taken into consideration and for each Service Level Objective (SLO) the related services domains will be indicated. The purpose of this survey is to identify existing research gaps in utilising SLA elements to develop a generic methodology, considering all quality parameters beyond the Quality of Service (QoS) and what must or can be taken into account to define, establish and deploy an SLA. This study is still an active research on how to specify and develop an SLA to achieve the win-win agreements among all actors.Peer ReviewedPostprint (published version

A Process Framework for Managing Quality of Service in Private Cloud

As information systems leaders tap into the global market of cloud computing-based services, they struggle to maintain consistent application performance due to lack of a process framework for managing quality of service (QoS) in the cloud. Guided by the disruptive innovation theory, the purpose of this case study was to identify a process framework for meeting the QoS requirements of private cloud service users. Private cloud implementation was explored by selecting an organization in California through purposeful sampling. Information was gathered by interviewing 23 information technology (IT) professionals, a mix of frontline engineers, managers, and leaders involved in the implementation of private cloud. Another source of data was documents such as standard operating procedures, policies, and guidelines related to private cloud implementation. Interview transcripts and documents were coded and sequentially analyzed. Three prominent themes emerged from the analysis of data: (a) end user expectations, (b) application architecture, and (c) trending analysis. The findings of this study may help IT leaders in effectively managing QoS in cloud infrastructure and deliver reliable application performance that may help in increasing customer population and profitability of organizations. This study may contribute to positive social change as information systems managers and workers can learn and apply the process framework for delivering stable and reliable cloud-hosted computer applications

Dynamic collaboration and secure access of services in multi-cloud environments

The cloud computing services have gained popularity in both public and enterprise domains and they process a large amount of user data with varying privacy levels. The increasing demand for cloud services including storage and computation requires new functional elements and provisioning schemes to meet user requirements. Multi-clouds can optimise the user requirements by allowing them to choose best services from a large number of services offered by various cloud providers as they are massively scalable, can be dynamically configured, and delivered on demand with large-scale infrastructure resources. A major concern related to multi-cloud adoption is the lack of models for them and their associated security issues which become more unpredictable in a multi-cloud environment. Moreover, in order to trust the services in a foreign cloud users depend on their assurances given by the cloud provider but cloud providers give very limited evidence or accountability to users which offers them the ability to hide some behaviour of the service. In this thesis, we propose a model for multi-cloud collaboration that can securely establish dynamic collaboration between heterogeneous clouds using the cloud on-demand model in a secure way. Initially, threat modelling for cloud services has been done that leads to the identification of various threats to service interfaces along with the possible attackers and the mechanisms to exploit those threats. Based on these threats the cloud provider can apply suitable mechanisms to protect services and user data from these threats. In the next phase, we present a lightweight and novel authentication mechanism which provides a single sign-on (SSO) to users for authentication at runtime between multi-clouds before granting them service access and it is formally verified. Next, we provide a service scheduling mechanism to select the best services from multiple cloud providers that closely match user quality of service requirements (QoS). The scheduling mechanism achieves high accuracy by providing distance correlation weighting mechanism among a large number of services QoS parameters. In the next stage, novel service level agreement (SLA) management mechanisms are proposed to ensure secure service execution in the foreign cloud. The usage of SLA mechanisms ensures that user QoS parameters including the functional (CPU, RAM, memory etc.) and non-functional requirements (bandwidth, latency, availability, reliability etc.) of users for a particular service are negotiated before secure collaboration between multi-clouds is setup. The multi-cloud handling user requests will be responsible to enforce mechanisms that fulfil the QoS requirements agreed in the SLA. While the monitoring phase in SLA involves monitoring the service execution in the foreign cloud to check its compliance with the SLA and report it back to the user. Finally, we present the use cases of applying the proposed model in scenarios such as Internet of Things (IoT) and E-Healthcare in multi-clouds. Moreover, the designed protocols are empirically implemented on two different clouds including OpenStack and Amazon AWS. Experiments indicate that the proposed model is scalable, authentication protocols result only in a limited overhead compared to standard authentication protocols, service scheduling achieves high efficiency and any SLA violations by a cloud provider can be recorded and reported back to the user.My research for first 3 years of PhD was funded by the College of Engineering and Technology