Cloud computing resource scheduling and a survey of its evolutionary approaches

A disruptive technology fundamentally transforming the way that computing services are delivered, cloud computing offers information and communication technology users a new dimension of convenience of resources, as services via the Internet. Because cloud provides a finite pool of virtualized on-demand resources, optimally scheduling them has become an essential and rewarding topic, where a trend of using Evolutionary Computation (EC) algorithms is emerging rapidly. Through analyzing the cloud computing architecture, this survey first presents taxonomy at two levels of scheduling cloud resources. It then paints a landscape of the scheduling problem and solutions. According to the taxonomy, a comprehensive survey of state-of-the-art approaches is presented systematically. Looking forward, challenges and potential future research directions are investigated and invited, including real-time scheduling, adaptive dynamic scheduling, large-scale scheduling, multiobjective scheduling, and distributed and parallel scheduling. At the dawn of Industry 4.0, cloud computing scheduling for cyber-physical integration with the presence of big data is also discussed. Research in this area is only in its infancy, but with the rapid fusion of information and data technology, more exciting and agenda-setting topics are likely to emerge on the horizon

Service Level Agreement Aware SaaS Placement in Cloud

Cloud computing is an encouraging and favourable paradigm for both providers and consumers in diverse scopes of endeavors. Software as a Service (SaaS) is a method of conveying services or applications through the Internet – as a service, and it is known to be one of the very crucial computing services in cloud computing. Cloud computing has become a major medium for the SaaS providers to provide their applications because required scalability can be achieved through this. The challenges of SaaS placement process depends on various factors comprising cloud network size, resource requirements, and communication among its components. This thesis analyzes the SaaS Placement Problem (SPP) and proposes a mathematical model for SaaS placement in Cloud. This thesis gives an evolutionary approach, known as Particle Swarm Optimization (PSO) that has been applied to find the optimal placement of SaaS component and aiming to minimize the total cost incurred to the SaaS provider, and then evaluated against the traditional Greedy approach in experiments. The obtained results show our proposed algorithm SPPSO generates better solutions than Greedy approach SPGA

Optimized task scheduling based on hybrid symbiotic organisms search algorithms for cloud computing environment

In Cloud Computing model, users are charged according to the usage of resources and desired Quality of Service (QoS). Task scheduling algorithms are responsible for specifying adequate set of resources to execute user applications in the form of tasks, and schedule decisions of task scheduling algorithms are based on QoS requirements defined by the user. Task scheduling problem is an NP-Complete problem, due to the NP-Complete nature of task scheduling problems and huge search space presented by large scale problem instances, many of the existing solution algorithms incur high computational complexity and cannot effectively obtain global optimum solutions. Recently, Symbiotic Organisms Search (SOS) has been applied to various optimization problems and results obtained were found to be competitive with state-of-the-art metaheuristic algorithms. However, similar to the case other metaheuristic optimization algorithms, the efficiency of SOS algorithm deteriorates as the size of the search space increases. Moreover, SOS suffers from local optima entrapment and its static control parameters cannot maintain a balance between local and global search. In this study, Cooperative Coevolutionary Constrained Multiobjective Symbiotic Organisms Search (CC-CMSOS), Cooperative Coevolutionary Constrained Multi-objective Memetic Symbiotic Organisms Search (CC-CMMSOS), and Cooperative Coevolutionary Constrained Multi-objective Adaptive Benefit Factor Symbiotic Organisms Search (CC-CMABFSOS) algorithms are proposed to solve constrained multi-objective large scale task scheduling optimization problem on IaaS cloud computing environment. To address the issue of scalability, the concept of Cooperative Coevolutionary for enhancing SOS named CC-CMSOS make SOS more efficient for solving large scale task scheduling problems. CC-CMMSOS algorithm further improves the performance of SOS algorithm by hybridizing with Simulated Annealing (SA) to avoid entrapment in local optima for global convergence. Finally, CC-CMABFSOS algorithm adaptively turn SOS control parameters to balance the local and global search procedure for faster convergence speed. The performance of the proposed CC-CMSOS, CC-CMMSOS, and CC-CMABFSOS algorithms are evaluated on CloudSim simulator, using both standard workload traces and synthesized workloads for larger problem instances of up to 5000. Moreover, CC-CMSOS, CC-CMMSOS, and CC-CMABFSOS algorithms are compared with multi-objective optimization algorithms, namely, EMS-C, ECMSMOO, and BOGA. The CC-CMSOS, CC-CMMSOS, and CC-CMABFSOS algorithms obtained significant improved optimal trade-offs between execution time (makespan) and financial cost (cost) while meeting deadline constraints with no computational overhead. The performance improvements obtained by the proposed algorithms in terms of hypervolume ranges from 8.72% to 37.95% across the workloads. Therefore, the proposed algorithms have potentials to improve the performance of QoS delivery

Automated and dynamic multi-level negotiation framework applied to an efficient cloud provisioning

L’approvisionnement du Cloud est le processus de déploiement et de gestion des applications sur les infrastructures publiques du Cloud. Il est de plus en plus utilisé car il permet aux fournisseurs de services métiers de se concentrer sur leurs activités sans avoir à gérer et à investir dans l’infrastructure. Il comprend deux niveaux d’interaction : (1) entre les utilisateurs finaux et les fournisseurs de services pour l’approvisionnement des applications, et (2) entre les fournisseurs de services et les fournisseurs de ressources pour l’approvisionnement des ressources virtuelles. L’environnement Cloud est devenu un marché complexe où tout fournisseur veut maximiser son profit monétaire et où les utilisateurs finaux recherchent les services les plus efficaces tout en minimisant leurs coûts. Avec la croissance de la concurrence dans le Cloud, les fournisseurs de services métiers doivent assurer un approvisionnement efficace qui maximise la satisfaction de la clientèle et optimise leurs profits.Ainsi, les fournisseurs et les utilisateurs doivent être satisfaits en dépit de leurs besoins contradictoires. La négociation est une solution prometteuse qui permet de résoudre les conflits en comblant le gap entre les capacités des fournisseurs et les besoins des utilisateurs. Intuitivement, la négociation automatique des contrats (SLA) permet d’aboutir à un compromis qui satisfait les deux parties. Cependant, pour être efficace, la négociation automatique doit considérer les propriétés de l’approvisionnement du Cloud et les complexités liées à la dynamicité (dynamicité de la disponibilité des ressources, dynamicité des prix). En fait ces critères ont un impact important sur le succès de la négociation. Les principales contributions de cette thèse répondant au défi de la négociation multi-niveau dans un contexte dynamique sont les suivantes: (1) Nous proposons un modèle de négociateur générique qui considère la nature dynamique de l’approvisionnement du Cloud et son impact potentiel sur les résultats décisionnels. Ensuite, nous construisons un cadre de négociation multicouche fondé sur ce modèle en l’instanciant entre les couches du Cloud. Le cadre comprend des agents négociateurs en communication avec les modules en relation avec la qualité et le prix du service à fournir (le planificateur, le moniteur, le prospecteur de marché). (2) Nous proposons une approche de négociation bilatérale entre les utilisateurs finaux et les fournisseurs de service basée sur une approche d’approvisionnement existante. Les stratégies de négociation sont basées sur la communication avec les modules d’approvisionnement (le planificateur et l’approvisionneur de machines virtuelles) afin d’optimiser les bénéfices du fournisseur de service et de maximiser la satisfaction du client. (3) Afin de maximiser le nombre de clients, nous proposons une approche de négociation adaptative et simultanée comme extension de la négociation bilatérale. Nous proposons d’exploiter les changements de charge de travail en termes de disponibilité et de tarification des ressources afin de renégocier simultanément avec plusieurs utilisateurs non acceptés (c’est-à-dire rejetés lors de la première session de négociation) avant la création du contrat SLA. (4) Afin de gérer toute violation possible de SLA, nous proposons une approche proactive de renégociation après l’établissement de SLA. La renégociation est lancée lors de la détection d’un événement inattendu (par exemple, une panne de ressources) pendant le processus d’approvisionnement. Les stratégies de renégociation proposées visent à minimiser la perte de profit pour le fournisseur et à assurer la continuité du service pour le consommateur. Les approches proposées sont mises en œuvre et les expériences prouvent les avantages d’ajouter la (re)négociation au processus d’approvisionnement. L’utilisation de la (re)négociation améliore le bénéfice du fournisseur, le nombre de demandes acceptées et la satisfaction du client.Cloud provisioning is the process of deployment and management of applications on public cloud infrastructures. Cloud provisioning is used increasingly because it enables business providers to focus on their business without having to manage and invest in infrastructure. Cloud provisioning includes two levels of interaction: (1) between end-users and business providers for application provisioning; and (2) between business providers and resource providers for virtual resource provisioning.The cloud market nowadays is a complex environment where business providers need to maximize their monetary profit, and where end-users look for the most efficient services with the lowest prices. With the growth of competition in the cloud, business providers must ensure efficient provisioning that maximizes customer satisfaction and optimizes the providers’ profit. So, both providers and users must be satisfied in spite of their conflicting needs. Negotiation is an appealing solution to solve conflicts and bridge the gap between providers’ capabilities and users’ requirements. Intuitively, automated Service Level Agreement (SLA) negotiation helps in reaching an agreement that satisfies both parties. However, to be efficient, automated negotiation should consider the properties of cloud provisioning mainly the two interaction levels, and complexities related to dynamicity (e.g., dynamically-changing resource availability, dynamic pricing, dynamic market factors related to offers and demands), which greatly impact the success of the negotiation. The main contributions of this thesis tackling the challenge of multi-level negotiation in a dynamic context are as follows: (1) We propose a generic negotiator model that considers the dynamic nature of cloud provisioning and its potential impact on the decision-making outcome. Then, we build a multi-layer negotiation framework built upon that model by instantiating it among Cloud layers. The framework includes negotiator agents. These agents are in communication with the provisioning modules that have an impact on the quality and the price of the service to be provisioned (e.g, the scheduler, the monitor, the market prospector). (2) We propose a bilateral negotiation approach between end-users and business providers extending an existing provisioning approach. The proposed decision-making strategies for negotiation are based on communication with the provisioning modules (the scheduler and the VM provisioner) in order to optimize the business provider’s profit and maximize customer satisfaction. (3) In order to maximize the number of clients, we propose an adaptive and concurrent negotiation approach as an extension of the bilateral negotiation. We propose to harness the workload changes in terms of resource availability and pricing in order to renegotiate simultaneously with multiple non-accepted users (i.e., rejected during the first negotiation session) before the establishment of the SLA. (4) In order to handle any potential SLA violation, we propose a proactive renegotiation approach after SLA establishment. The renegotiation is launched upon detecting an unexpected event (e.g., resource failure) during the provisioning process. The proposed renegotiation decision-making strategies aim to minimize the loss in profit for the provider and to ensure the continuity of the service for the consumer. The proposed approaches are implemented and experiments prove the benefits of adding (re)negotiation to the provisioning process. The use of (re)negotiation improves the provider’s profit, the number of accepted requests, and the client’s satisfaction

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

Enhanced non-parametric sequence learning scheme for internet of things sensory data in cloud infrastructure

The Internet of Things (IoT) Cloud is an emerging technology that enables machine-to-machine, human-to-machine and human-to-human interaction through the Internet. IoT sensor devices tend to generate sensory data known for their dynamic and heterogeneous nature. Hence, it makes it elusive to be managed by the sensor devices due to their limited computation power and storage space. However, the Cloud Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) leverages the limitations of the IoT devices by making its computation power and storage resources available to execute IoT sensory data. In IoT-Cloud IaaS, resource allocation is the process of distributing optimal resources to execute data request tasks that comprise data filtering operations. Recently, machine learning, non-heuristics, multi-objective and hybrid algorithms have been applied for efficient resource allocation to execute IoT sensory data filtering request tasks in IoT-enabled Cloud IaaS. However, the filtering task is still prone to some challenges. These challenges include global search entrapment of event and error outlier detection as the dimension of the dataset increases in size, the inability of missing data recovery for effective redundant data elimination and local search entrapment that leads to unbalanced workloads on available resources required for task execution. In this thesis, the enhancement of Non-Parametric Sequence Learning (NPSL), Perceptually Important Point (PIP) and Efficient Energy Resource Ranking- Virtual Machine Selection (ERVS) algorithms were proposed. The Non-Parametric Sequence-based Agglomerative Gaussian Mixture Model (NPSAGMM) technique was initially utilized to improve the detection of event and error outliers in the global space as the dimension of the dataset increases in size. Then, Perceptually Important Points K-means-enabled Cosine and Manhattan (PIP-KCM) technique was employed to recover missing data to improve the elimination of duplicate sensed data records. Finally, an Efficient Resource Balance Ranking- based Glow-warm Swarm Optimization (ERBV-GSO) technique was used to resolve the local search entrapment for near-optimal solutions and to reduce workload imbalance on available resources for task execution in the IoT-Cloud IaaS platform. Experiments were carried out using the NetworkX simulator and the results of N-PSAGMM, PIP-KCM and ERBV-GSO techniques with N-PSL, PIP, ERVS and Resource Fragmentation Aware (RF-Aware) algorithms were compared. The experimental results showed that the proposed NPSAGMM, PIP-KCM, and ERBV-GSO techniques produced a tremendous performance improvement rate based on 3.602%/6.74% Precision, 9.724%/8.77% Recall, 5.350%/4.42% Area under Curve for the detection of event and error outliers. Furthermore, the results indicated an improvement rate of 94.273% F1-score, 0.143 Reduction Ratio, and with minimum 0.149% Root Mean Squared Error for redundant data elimination as well as the minimum number of 608 Virtual Machine migrations, 47.62% Resource Utilization and 41.13% load balancing degree for the allocation of desired resources deployed to execute sensory data filtering tasks respectively. Therefore, the proposed techniques have proven to be effective for improving the load balancing of allocating the desired resources to execute efficient outlier (Event and Error) detection and eliminate redundant data records in the IoT-based Cloud IaaS Infrastructure

Security in Cloud Computing: Evaluation and Integration

Au cours de la dernière décennie, le paradigme du Cloud Computing a révolutionné la manière dont nous percevons les services de la Technologie de l’Information (TI). Celui-ci nous a donné l’opportunité de répondre à la demande constamment croissante liée aux besoins informatiques des usagers en introduisant la notion d’externalisation des services et des données. Les consommateurs du Cloud ont généralement accès, sur demande, à un large éventail bien réparti d’infrastructures de TI offrant une pléthore de services. Ils sont à même de configurer dynamiquement les ressources du Cloud en fonction des exigences de leurs applications, sans toutefois devenir partie intégrante de l’infrastructure du Cloud. Cela leur permet d’atteindre un degré optimal d’utilisation des ressources tout en réduisant leurs coûts d’investissement en TI. Toutefois, la migration des services au Cloud intensifie malgré elle les menaces existantes à la sécurité des TI et en crée de nouvelles qui sont intrinsèques à l’architecture du Cloud Computing. C’est pourquoi il existe un réel besoin d’évaluation des risques liés à la sécurité du Cloud durant le procédé de la sélection et du déploiement des services. Au cours des dernières années, l’impact d’une efficace gestion de la satisfaction des besoins en sécurité des services a été pris avec un sérieux croissant de la part des fournisseurs et des consommateurs. Toutefois, l’intégration réussie de l’élément de sécurité dans les opérations de la gestion des ressources du Cloud ne requiert pas seulement une recherche méthodique, mais aussi une modélisation méticuleuse des exigences du Cloud en termes de sécurité. C’est en considérant ces facteurs que nous adressons dans cette thèse les défis liés à l’évaluation de la sécurité et à son intégration dans les environnements indépendants et interconnectés du Cloud Computing. D’une part, nous sommes motivés à offrir aux consommateurs du Cloud un ensemble de méthodes qui leur permettront d’optimiser la sécurité de leurs services et, d’autre part, nous offrons aux fournisseurs un éventail de stratégies qui leur permettront de mieux sécuriser leurs services d’hébergements du Cloud. L’originalité de cette thèse porte sur deux aspects : 1) la description innovatrice des exigences des applications du Cloud relativement à la sécurité ; et 2) la conception de modèles mathématiques rigoureux qui intègrent le facteur de sécurité dans les problèmes traditionnels du déploiement des applications, d’approvisionnement des ressources et de la gestion de la charge de travail au coeur des infrastructures actuelles du Cloud Computing. Le travail au sein de cette thèse est réalisé en trois phases.----------ABSTRACT: Over the past decade, the Cloud Computing paradigm has revolutionized the way we envision IT services. It has provided an opportunity to respond to the ever increasing computing needs of the users by introducing the notion of service and data outsourcing. Cloud consumers usually have online and on-demand access to a large and distributed IT infrastructure providing a plethora of services. They can dynamically configure and scale the Cloud resources according to the requirements of their applications without becoming part of the Cloud infrastructure, which allows them to reduce their IT investment cost and achieve optimal resource utilization. However, the migration of services to the Cloud increases the vulnerability to existing IT security threats and creates new ones that are intrinsic to the Cloud Computing architecture, thus the need for a thorough assessment of Cloud security risks during the process of service selection and deployment. Recently, the impact of effective management of service security satisfaction has been taken with greater seriousness by the Cloud Service Providers (CSP) and stakeholders. Nevertheless, the successful integration of the security element into the Cloud resource management operations does not only require methodical research, but also necessitates the meticulous modeling of the Cloud security requirements. To this end, we address throughout this thesis the challenges to security evaluation and integration in independent and interconnected Cloud Computing environments. We are interested in providing the Cloud consumers with a set of methods that allow them to optimize the security of their services and the CSPs with a set of strategies that enable them to provide security-aware Cloud-based service hosting. The originality of this thesis lies within two aspects: 1) the innovative description of the Cloud applications’ security requirements, which paved the way for an effective quantification and evaluation of the security of Cloud infrastructures; and 2) the design of rigorous mathematical models that integrate the security factor into the traditional problems of application deployment, resource provisioning, and workload management within current Cloud Computing infrastructures. The work in this thesis is carried out in three phases

A new priority rule cloud scheduling technique that utilizes gaps to increase the efficiency of jobs distribution

In recent years, the concept of cloud computing has been gaining traction to provide dynamically increasing access to shared computing resources (software and hardware) via the internet. It’s no secret that cloud computing’s ability to supply mission-critical services has made job scheduling a hot subject in the industry right now. However, the efficient utilization of these cloud resources has been a challenge, often resulting in wastage or degraded service performance due to poor scheduling. To solve this issue, existing research has been focused on queue-based job scheduling techniques, where jobs are scheduled based on specific deadlines or job lengths. To overcome this challenge, numerous researchers have focused on improving existing Priority Rule (PR) cloud schedulers by developing dynamic scheduling algorithms, but they have fallen short of meeting user satisfaction, such as flowtime, makespan, and total tardiness. These are the limitations of the current implementation of existing Priority Rule (PR) schedulers, mainly caused by blocking made by jobs at the head of the queue. These limitations lead to the poor performance of cloud-based mobile applications and other cloud services. To address this issue, the main objective of this research is to improve the existing PR cloud schedulers by developing a new dynamic scheduling algorithm by manipulating the gaps in the cloud job schedule. In this thesis, first a Priority-Based Fair Scheduling (PBFS) algorithm has been introduced to schedule jobs so that jobs get access to the required resources at optimal times. Then, a backfilling strategy called Shortest Gap Priority-Based Fair Scheduling (SG-PBFS) is proposed that attempts to manipulate the gaps in the schedule of cloud jobs. Finally, the performance evaluation demonstrates that the proposed SG-PBFS algorithm outperforms SG-SJF, SG-LJF, SG-FCFS, SG-EDF, and SG-(MAX-MIN) in terms of flow time, makespan time, and total tardiness, which conclusively demonstrates its effectiveness. The experiment result shows that for 500 jobs, SG-PBFS flow time, makespan time, and tardiness time are 9%, 4%, and 7% less than PBFS gradually

A service broker for Intercloud computing

This thesis aims at assisting users in finding the most suitable Cloud resources taking into account their functional and non-functional SLA requirements. A key feature of the work is a Cloud service broker acting as mediator between consumers and Clouds. The research involves the implementation and evaluation of two SLA-aware match-making algorithms by use of a simulation environment. The work investigates also the optimal deployment of Multi-Cloud workflows on Intercloud environments