4,567 research outputs found

    Digital curation and the cloud

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    Digital curation involves a wide range of activities, many of which could benefit from cloud deployment to a greater or lesser extent. These range from infrequent, resource-intensive tasks which benefit from the ability to rapidly provision resources to day-to-day collaborative activities which can be facilitated by networked cloud services. Associated benefits are offset by risks such as loss of data or service level, legal and governance incompatibilities and transfer bottlenecks. There is considerable variability across both risks and benefits according to the service and deployment models being adopted and the context in which activities are performed. Some risks, such as legal liabilities, are mitigated by the use of alternative, e.g., private cloud models, but this is typically at the expense of benefits such as resource elasticity and economies of scale. Infrastructure as a Service model may provide a basis on which more specialised software services may be provided. There is considerable work to be done in helping institutions understand the cloud and its associated costs, risks and benefits, and how these compare to their current working methods, in order that the most beneficial uses of cloud technologies may be identified. Specific proposals, echoing recent work coordinated by EPSRC and JISC are the development of advisory, costing and brokering services to facilitate appropriate cloud deployments, the exploration of opportunities for certifying or accrediting cloud preservation providers, and the targeted publicity of outputs from pilot studies to the full range of stakeholders within the curation lifecycle, including data creators and owners, repositories, institutional IT support professionals and senior manager

    Investigating Decision Support Techniques for Automating Cloud Service Selection

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    The compass of Cloud infrastructure services advances steadily leaving users in the agony of choice. To be able to select the best mix of service offering from an abundance of possibilities, users must consider complex dependencies and heterogeneous sets of criteria. Therefore, we present a PhD thesis proposal on investigating an intelligent decision support system for selecting Cloud based infrastructure services (e.g. storage, network, CPU).Comment: Accepted by IEEE Cloudcom 2012 - PhD consortium trac

    Elastic Highly Available Cloud Computing

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    High availability and elasticity are two the cloud computing services technical features. Elasticity is a key feature of cloud computing where provisioning of resources is closely tied to the runtime demand. High availability assure that cloud applications are resilient to failures. Existing cloud solutions focus on providing both features at the level of the virtual resource through virtual machines by managing their restart, addition, and removal as needed. These existing solutions map applications to a specific design, which is not suitable for many applications especially virtualized telecommunication applications that are required to meet carrier grade standards. Carrier grade applications typically rely on the underlying platform to manage their availability by monitoring heartbeats, executing recoveries, and attempting repairs to bring the system back to normal. Migrating such applications to the cloud can be particularly challenging, especially if the elasticity policies target the application only, without considering the underlying platform contributing to its high availability (HA). In this thesis, a Network Function Virtualization (NFV) framework is introduced; the challenges and requirements of its use in mobile networks are discussed. In particular, an architecture for NFV framework entities in the virtual environment is proposed. In order to reduce signaling traffic congestion and achieve better performance, a criterion to bundle multiple functions of virtualized evolved packet-core in a single physical device or a group of adjacent devices is proposed. The analysis shows that the proposed grouping can reduce the network control traffic by 70 percent. Moreover, a comprehensive framework for the elasticity of highly available applications that considers the elastic deployment of the platform and the HA placement of the application’s components is proposed. The approach is applied to an internet protocol multimedia subsystem (IMS) application and demonstrate how, within a matter of seconds, the IMS application can be scaled up while maintaining its HA status

    Can open-source projects (re-) shape the SDN/NFV-driven telecommunication market?

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    Telecom network operators face rapidly changing business needs. Due to their dependence on long product cycles they lack the ability to quickly respond to changing user demands. To spur innovation and stay competitive, network operators are investigating technological solutions with a proven track record in other application domains such as open source software projects. Open source software enables parties to learn, use, or contribute to technology from which they were previously excluded. OSS has reshaped many application areas including the landscape of operating systems and consumer software. The paradigmshift in telecommunication systems towards Software-Defined Networking introduces possibilities to benefit from open source projects. Implementing the control part of networks in software enables speedier adaption and innovation, and less dependencies on legacy protocols or algorithms hard-coded in the control part of network devices. The recently proposed concept of Network Function Virtualization pushes the softwarization of telecommunication functionalities even further down to the data plane. Within the NFV paradigm, functionality which was previously reserved for dedicated hardware implementations can now be implemented in software and deployed on generic Commercial Off-The Shelf (COTS) hardware. This paper provides an overview of existing open source initiatives for SDN/NFV-based network architectures, involving infrastructure to orchestration-related functionality. It situates them in a business process context and identifies the pros and cons for the market in general, as well as for individual actors

    Legacy-palveluiden kontainerisointi ja pilvimigraatio

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    A research group has multiple web services running on an outdated server hardware. Many of the services are old and not actively developed anymore and also often depend on outdated software, which is problematic from the security point of view. It is time to decommission the old hardware and therefore the services needs to be migrated onto a more modern platform. While migrating away from the old servers, we want to make the services easier for the research group to maintain and improve security where possible. Containerization technologies are an increasingly popular way to build, package and deploy software. Containers provide a convenient way to package software along with it dependencies to be easily run across different computers and operating systems. While being more lightweight than virtual machines, containers provide a layer of isolation between services running on a same host. Containerized services can be hosted on a cloud container platforms such as Kubernetes or OpenShift. In this thesis work, multiple existing web services built on top of varying techonologies are containerized. The containerized services are then deployed onto an OpenShift cloud container platform. We see how containerization can lead to better maintainability and security of olded services. Containerization provides a layer of isolation between the services improving security and makes it easier to deploy them on different plaftorms if needed. The OpenShift platform provides container orchestration and tools for automating builds and deployment, which we utilize to make sure that the services and their dependencies are always kept upt-do-date.Tutkimusryhmällä on useita verkkopalveluita, joita ajetaan vanhentuneella, paikallisella palvelinalustalla. Monet näistä palveluista eivät ole enää aktiivisessa kehityksessä. Useat palveluista ovat riippuvaisia vanhoista ohjelmistoversioista, joka on ongelmallista palveluiden turvallisuuden kannalta. Vanhat palvelimet on tarkoitus poistaa käytöstä, ja palvelut tulee siirtää uudelle alustalle. Siirron yhteydessä haluamme tehdä palveluiste tutkimusryhmälle helpompia ylläpitää sekä parantaa palveluiden turvallisuutta, mikäli mahdollista. Kontainerisointi on suosittu tapa rakentaa, paketoida ja ajaa ohjelmistoja. Kontainerit mahdollistavat ohjelmiston ja sen riippuvuuksien sisällyttämisen samaan pakettiin, tehden ohjelmiston ajamisesta eri alustoilla ja käyttöjärjestelmillä helppoa. Kontainerit ovat kevyempiä kuin perinteiset virtuaalikoneet, mutta eristävät kuitenkin samassa ympäristössä ajettavat ohjelmistot toisistaan. Kontainerisoituja palveluita voidaan ajaa pilvikontaineriympäristöissä, kuten Kubernetes ja OpenShift. Tässä diplomityössä kontainerisoimme useita eri teknologioihin perustuvia verkkopalveluita. Kontainerisoidut palvelut viedään OpenShift -pilvikontaineralustalle. Näemme, kuinka kontainerisointi voi parantaa verkkopalveluiden ylläpidettävyyttä ja turvallisuutta. OpenShift -alusta huolehtii kontainereiden orkestroinnista sekä tarjoaa meille työkalut kontainereiden luonnin ja ajamisen automatisointiin. Hyödynnämme tätä palveluiden ja niiden ohjelmistoriippuvuuksien automaattiseen päivitykseen
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