Observing the clouds : a survey and taxonomy of cloud monitoring

This research was supported by a Royal Society Industry Fellowship and an Amazon Web Services (AWS) grant. Date of Acceptance: 10/12/2014Monitoring is an important aspect of designing and maintaining large-scale systems. Cloud computing presents a unique set of challenges to monitoring including: on-demand infrastructure, unprecedented scalability, rapid elasticity and performance uncertainty. There are a wide range of monitoring tools originating from cluster and high-performance computing, grid computing and enterprise computing, as well as a series of newer bespoke tools, which have been designed exclusively for cloud monitoring. These tools express a number of common elements and designs, which address the demands of cloud monitoring to various degrees. This paper performs an exhaustive survey of contemporary monitoring tools from which we derive a taxonomy, which examines how effectively existing tools and designs meet the challenges of cloud monitoring. We conclude by examining the socio-technical aspects of monitoring, and investigate the engineering challenges and practices behind implementing monitoring strategies for cloud computing.Publisher PDFPeer reviewe

GMonE: a complete approach to cloud monitoring

The inherent complexity of modern cloud infrastructures has created the need for innovative monitoring approaches, as state-of-the-art solutions used for other large-scale environments do not address specific cloud features. Although cloud monitoring is nowadays an active research field, a comprehensive study covering all its aspects has not been presented yet. This paper provides a deep insight into cloud monitoring. It proposes a unified cloud monitoring taxonomy, based on which it defines a layered cloud monitoring architecture. To illustrate it, we have implemented GMonE, a general-purpose cloud monitoring tool which covers all aspects of cloud monitoring by specifically addressing the needs of modern cloud infrastructures. Furthermore, we have evaluated the performance, scalability and overhead of GMonE with Yahoo Cloud Serving Benchmark (YCSB), by using the OpenNebula cloud middleware on the Grid’5000 experimental testbed. The results of this evaluation demonstrate the benefits of our approach, surpassing the monitoring performance and capabilities of cloud monitoring alternatives such as those present in state-of-the-art systems such as Amazon EC2 and OpenNebula

A Taxonomy of Workflow Management Systems for Grid Computing

With the advent of Grid and application technologies, scientists and engineers are building more and more complex applications to manage and process large data sets, and execute scientific experiments on distributed resources. Such application scenarios require means for composing and executing complex workflows. Therefore, many efforts have been made towards the development of workflow management systems for Grid computing. In this paper, we propose a taxonomy that characterizes and classifies various approaches for building and executing workflows on Grids. We also survey several representative Grid workflow systems developed by various projects world-wide to demonstrate the comprehensiveness of the taxonomy. The taxonomy not only highlights the design and engineering similarities and differences of state-of-the-art in Grid workflow systems, but also identifies the areas that need further research.Comment: 29 pages, 15 figure

Use of soil and climate data to assess the risk of agricultural drought for policy support in Europe.

This paper describes the use of soil and climatic data for assessing the risk of drought in Europe. Soil moisture regimes are defined for soil classification purposes and these can be used to delineate areas with the same type of soil climate. Maps showing the distribution of arid soils in USA and dry areas in Southern Europe are presented. In the case of agricultural drought, it is the soil water available to plants (SWAP) that is the most important soil factor in assessing this risk and a simple model for estimating this is described. This model can be linked to spatial and point data from the European Soil Database. In the absence of sufficient soil water retention measurements, preliminary maps of SWAP in Europe have been produced using pedotransfer rules. The study concludes that basic soil maps can be used to identify some areas where agricultural drought is likely to be a problem. However more precise modelling of droughtiness, based on interactions of soil available water with the average soil moisture deficit, estimated from meteorological data, is needed, to support policy making today

Business Grid Services

Grid services have come to represent the synthesis of web services and grid computing paradigms. Web services provide the means to modularize software, enabling loosely coupled and novel synthesis. Grid computing removes the binding between functional software components and specific hosting hardware, enabling software to be deployed dynamically over a network (e.g. intra-, extra- or inter-net). Applying the constructs of grid computing to the service orientation of enterprise software will allow business service networks to utilize more specialized services. An upper service ontology that enables business grid services to be described and then related to the grid hosting platform is presented. Explicit knowledge is required for enterprise software, hosting servers and the domain that can then be utilized by both SLA and reservation systems. The ontology presented is derived from and validated using a collection of web services taken from leading investment banks