Autonomic Cloud Computing: Open Challenges and Architectural Elements

As Clouds are complex, large-scale, and heterogeneous distributed systems, management of their resources is a challenging task. They need automated and integrated intelligent strategies for provisioning of resources to offer services that are secure, reliable, and cost-efficient. Hence, effective management of services becomes fundamental in software platforms that constitute the fabric of computing Clouds. In this direction, this paper identifies open issues in autonomic resource provisioning and presents innovative management techniques for supporting SaaS applications hosted on Clouds. We present a conceptual architecture and early results evidencing the benefits of autonomic management of Clouds.Comment: 8 pages, 6 figures, conference keynote pape

SLA-Oriented Resource Provisioning for Cloud Computing: Challenges, Architecture, and Solutions

Cloud computing systems promise to offer subscription-oriented, enterprise-quality computing services to users worldwide. With the increased demand for delivering services to a large number of users, they need to offer differentiated services to users and meet their quality expectations. Existing resource management systems in data centers are yet to support Service Level Agreement (SLA)-oriented resource allocation, and thus need to be enhanced to realize cloud computing and utility computing. In addition, no work has been done to collectively incorporate customer-driven service management, computational risk management, and autonomic resource management into a market-based resource management system to target the rapidly changing enterprise requirements of Cloud computing. This paper presents vision, challenges, and architectural elements of SLA-oriented resource management. The proposed architecture supports integration of marketbased provisioning policies and virtualisation technologies for flexible allocation of resources to applications. The performance results obtained from our working prototype system shows the feasibility and effectiveness of SLA-based resource provisioning in Clouds.Comment: 10 pages, 7 figures, Conference Keynote Paper: 2011 IEEE International Conference on Cloud and Service Computing (CSC 2011, IEEE Press, USA), Hong Kong, China, December 12-14, 201

InterCloud: Utility-Oriented Federation of Cloud Computing Environments for Scaling of Application Services

Cloud computing providers have setup several data centers at different geographical locations over the Internet in order to optimally serve needs of their customers around the world. However, existing systems do not support mechanisms and policies for dynamically coordinating load distribution among different Cloud-based data centers in order to determine optimal location for hosting application services to achieve reasonable QoS levels. Further, the Cloud computing providers are unable to predict geographic distribution of users consuming their services, hence the load coordination must happen automatically, and distribution of services must change in response to changes in the load. To counter this problem, we advocate creation of federated Cloud computing environment (InterCloud) that facilitates just-in-time, opportunistic, and scalable provisioning of application services, consistently achieving QoS targets under variable workload, resource and network conditions. The overall goal is to create a computing environment that supports dynamic expansion or contraction of capabilities (VMs, services, storage, and database) for handling sudden variations in service demands. This paper presents vision, challenges, and architectural elements of InterCloud for utility-oriented federation of Cloud computing environments. The proposed InterCloud environment supports scaling of applications across multiple vendor clouds. We have validated our approach by conducting a set of rigorous performance evaluation study using the CloudSim toolkit. The results demonstrate that federated Cloud computing model has immense potential as it offers significant performance gains as regards to response time and cost saving under dynamic workload scenarios.Comment: 20 pages, 4 figures, 3 tables, conference pape

Time for Cloud? Design and implementation of a time-based cloud resource management system

The current pay-per-use model adopted by public cloud service providers has influenced the perception on how a cloud should provide its resources to end-users, i.e. on-demand and access to an unlimited amount of resources. However, not all clouds are equal. While such provisioning models work for well-endowed public clouds, they may not always work well in private clouds with limited budget and resources such as research and education clouds. Private clouds also stand to be impacted greatly by issues such as user resource hogging and the misuse of resources for nefarious activities. These problems are usually caused by challenges such as (1) limited physical servers/ budget, (2) growing number of users and (3) the inability to gracefully and automatically relinquish resources from inactive users. Currently, cloud resource management frameworks used for private cloud setups, such as OpenStack and CloudStack, only uses the pay-per-use model as the basis when provisioning resources to users. In this paper, we propose OpenStack Café, a novel methodology adopting the concepts of 'time' and booking systems' to manage resources of private clouds. By allowing users to book resources over specific time-slots, our proposed solution can efficiently and automatically help administrators manage users' access to resource, addressing the issue of resource hogging and gracefully relinquish resources back to the pool in resource-constrained private cloud setups. Work is currently in progress to adopt Café into OpenStack as a feature, and results of our prototype show promises. We also present some insights to lessons learnt during the design and implementation of our proposed methodology in this paper

Secure communication using dynamic VPN provisioning in an Inter-Cloud environment

Most of the current cloud computing platforms offer Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) model, which aims to provision basic virtualised computing resources as on-demand and dynamic services. Nevertheless, a single cloud does not have limitless resources to offer to its users, hence the notion of an Inter-Cloud enviroment where a cloud can use the infrastructure resources of other clouds. However, there is no common framework in existence that allows the srevice owners to seamlessly provision even some basic services across multiple cloud service providers, albeit not due to any inherent incompatibility or proprietary nature of the foundation technologies on which these cloud platforms are built. In this paper we present a novel solution which aims to cover a gap in a subsection of this problem domain. Our solution offer a security architecture that enables service owners to provision a dynamic and service-oriented secure virtual private network on top of multiple cloud IaaS providers. It does this by leveraging the scalability, robustness and flexibility of peer- to-peer overlay techniques to eliminate the manual configuration, key management and peer churn problems encountered in setting up the secure communication channels dynamically, between different components of a typical service that is deployed on multiple clouds. We present the implementation details of our solution as well as experimental results carried out on two commercial clouds