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

Security architecture methodology for large net-centric systems

This thesis describes an over-arching security architecture methodology for large network enabled systems that can be scaled down for smaller network centric operations such as present at the University of Missouri-Rolla. By leveraging the five elements of security policy & standards, security risk management, security auditing, security federation and security management, of the proposed security architecture and addressing the specific needs of UMR, the methodology was used to determine places of improvement for UMR --Abstract, page iii

ISEL: An e-Taxation System for Employers

In 2008 the State of Geneva modified its regulation on taxation at source in order to collect electronic fiscal data from employers. Indeed the latter provide data on their employees directly to the tax administration (AFC) and furthermore pay taxes to the State on behalf of their employees. They subtract the corresponding amounts from employees' income and refund that money to the fiscal administration. The taxation at source system is applied to foreigners who work in Switzerland or who receive Swiss pensions, to people who live in Geneva but work in other Cantons, as well as to performers, artists or speakers who work occasionally in Geneva. More than 12'000 companies and 117'000 employees are concerned by the scheme, and large companies provide data on several thousand employees. In the past these files provided by employers were handled semi-automatically by the AFC (at best). The new system (called ISEL for Impôt à la Source En Ligne) offers employers two electronic channels to provide data on employees: file transfer (.XSD) and internet e-form. This case study describes the ISEL project and its context, and discusses the issues raised by the introduction of this e-taxation system. On the human side, our paper takes a qualitative approach, based on interviews of various stakeholders involved in the project. They were asked questions on ISEL's functionality, usability, performance, and so on. On the technical side, the paper presents the architecting principles of the e-government approach in Geneva (Legality, Responsibility, Transparency and Symmetry) and the workflow that was implemented on top of AFC's legacy system.private public partnership; tax collection; e-services; e-government; data exchange; architecture; usability

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