829 research outputs found
Elastic Business Process Management: State of the Art and Open Challenges for BPM in the Cloud
With the advent of cloud computing, organizations are nowadays able to react
rapidly to changing demands for computational resources. Not only individual
applications can be hosted on virtual cloud infrastructures, but also complete
business processes. This allows the realization of so-called elastic processes,
i.e., processes which are carried out using elastic cloud resources. Despite
the manifold benefits of elastic processes, there is still a lack of solutions
supporting them.
In this paper, we identify the state of the art of elastic Business Process
Management with a focus on infrastructural challenges. We conceptualize an
architecture for an elastic Business Process Management System and discuss
existing work on scheduling, resource allocation, monitoring, decentralized
coordination, and state management for elastic processes. Furthermore, we
present two representative elastic Business Process Management Systems which
are intended to counter these challenges. Based on our findings, we identify
open issues and outline possible research directions for the realization of
elastic processes and elastic Business Process Management.Comment: Please cite as: S. Schulte, C. Janiesch, S. Venugopal, I. Weber, and
P. Hoenisch (2015). Elastic Business Process Management: State of the Art and
Open Challenges for BPM in the Cloud. Future Generation Computer Systems,
Volume NN, Number N, NN-NN., http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.future.2014.09.00
A Reliable and Cost-Efficient Auto-Scaling System for Web Applications Using Heterogeneous Spot Instances
Cloud providers sell their idle capacity on markets through an auction-like
mechanism to increase their return on investment. The instances sold in this
way are called spot instances. In spite that spot instances are usually 90%
cheaper than on-demand instances, they can be terminated by provider when their
bidding prices are lower than market prices. Thus, they are largely used to
provision fault-tolerant applications only. In this paper, we explore how to
utilize spot instances to provision web applications, which are usually
considered availability-critical. The idea is to take advantage of differences
in price among various types of spot instances to reach both high availability
and significant cost saving. We first propose a fault-tolerant model for web
applications provisioned by spot instances. Based on that, we devise novel
auto-scaling polices for hourly billed cloud markets. We implemented the
proposed model and policies both on a simulation testbed for repeatable
validation and Amazon EC2. The experiments on the simulation testbed and the
real platform against the benchmarks show that the proposed approach can
greatly reduce resource cost and still achieve satisfactory Quality of Service
(QoS) in terms of response time and availability
Workload patterns for quality-driven dynamic cloud service configuration and auto-scaling
Cloud service providers negotiate SLAs for customer services they offer based on the reliability of performance and availability of their lower-level platform infrastructure. While availability management is more mature, performance management is less reliable. In order to support an iterative approach that supports the initial static infrastructure configuration as well as dynamic reconfiguration and auto-scaling, an accurate and efficient solution is required. We propose a prediction-based technique that combines a pattern matching approach with a traditional collaborative filtering solution to meet the accuracy and efficiency requirements. Service workload patterns abstract common infrastructure workloads from monitoring logs and act as a part of a first-stage high-performant configuration mechanism before more complex traditional methods are considered. This enhances current reactive rule-based scalability approaches and basic prediction techniques based on for example exponential smoothing
A survey and taxonomy of self-aware and self-adaptive cloud autoscaling systems
Autoscaling system can reconfigure cloud-based services and applications, through various configurations of cloud sofware and provisions of hardware resources, to adapt to the changing environment at runtime. Such a behavior offers the foundation for achieving elasticity in modern cloud computing paradigm. Given the dynamic and uncertain nature of the shared cloud infrastructure, cloud autoscaling system has been engineered as one of the most complex, sophisticated and intelligent artifacts created by human, aiming to achieve self-aware, self-adaptive and dependable runtime scaling. Yet, existing Self-aware and Self-adaptive Cloud Autoscaling System (SSCAS) is not mature to a state that it can be reliably exploited in the cloud. In this article, we survey the state-of-the-art research studies on SSCAS and provide a comprehensive taxonomy for this feld. We present detailed analysis of the results and provide insights on open challenges, as well as the promising directions that are worth investigated in the future work of this area of research. Our survey and taxonomy contribute to the fundamentals of engineering more intelligent autoscaling systems in the cloud
Self-Learning Cloud Controllers: Fuzzy Q-Learning for Knowledge Evolution
Cloud controllers aim at responding to application demands by automatically
scaling the compute resources at runtime to meet performance guarantees and
minimize resource costs. Existing cloud controllers often resort to scaling
strategies that are codified as a set of adaptation rules. However, for a cloud
provider, applications running on top of the cloud infrastructure are more or
less black-boxes, making it difficult at design time to define optimal or
pre-emptive adaptation rules. Thus, the burden of taking adaptation decisions
often is delegated to the cloud application. Yet, in most cases, application
developers in turn have limited knowledge of the cloud infrastructure. In this
paper, we propose learning adaptation rules during runtime. To this end, we
introduce FQL4KE, a self-learning fuzzy cloud controller. In particular, FQL4KE
learns and modifies fuzzy rules at runtime. The benefit is that for designing
cloud controllers, we do not have to rely solely on precise design-time
knowledge, which may be difficult to acquire. FQL4KE empowers users to specify
cloud controllers by simply adjusting weights representing priorities in system
goals instead of specifying complex adaptation rules. The applicability of
FQL4KE has been experimentally assessed as part of the cloud application
framework ElasticBench. The experimental results indicate that FQL4KE
outperforms our previously developed fuzzy controller without learning
mechanisms and the native Azure auto-scaling
Optimal cloud resource auto-scaling for web applications
In the on-demand cloud environment, web application providers have the potential to scale virtual resources up or down to achieve cost-effective outcomes. True elasticity and cost-effectiveness in the pay-per-use cloud business model, however, have not yet been achieved. To address this challenge, we propose a novel cloud resource auto-scaling scheme at the virtual machine (VM) level for web application providers. The scheme automatically predicts the number of web requests and discovers an optimal cloud resource demand with cost-latency trade-off. Based on this demand, the scheme makes a resource scaling decision that is up or down or NOP (no operation) in each time-unit re-allocation. We have implemented the scheme on the Amazon cloud platform and evaluated it using three real-world web log datasets. Our experiment results demonstrate that the proposed scheme achieves resource auto-scaling with an optimal cost-latency trade-off, as well as low SLA violations. © 2013 IEEE
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