Automated Software Configuration for Cloud Deployment

Nowadays the Internet is being used as a platform for providing a wide variety of different services. That has created challenges related to scaling IT infrastructure management. Cloud computing is a popular solution for scaling infrastructure, either by building a self-hosted cloud or by using cloud platform provided by external organizations. This way some the challenges related to large scale can be transferred to the cloud administrators. OpenStack is a group of open-source software projects for running cloud platforms. It is currently the most commonly used software for building private clouds. Since initially published by NASA and Rackspace, it has been used by various organizations such as Walmart, China Mobile and Cern nuclear research institute. The largest production deployments of OpenStack clouds consist of thousands of physical server computers located in multiple datacenters. The OpenStack community has created many deployment methods that take advantage of automated software configuration management. The deployment methods are built with state of the art software for automating different administrative tasks. They take different approaches to automating infrastructure management for OpenStack. This thesis compares some of the automated deployment methods for OpenStack and examines the benefits of using automation for configuration management. We present comparisons based on technical documentations as well as reference literature. Additionally, we conducted a questionnaire for OpenStack administrators about the use of automation. Lastly, we tested one of the deployment methods in a virtualized environment

Live-Migration in Cloud Computing Environment

O tráfego global de IP aumentou cinco vezes nos últimos cinco anos, e prevê-se que crescerá três vezes nos próximos cinco. Já para o período de 2013 a 2018, anteviu-se que o total do tráfego de IP iria aumentar a sua taxa composta de crescimento anual (CAGR) em, aproximadamente, 3.9 vezes. Assim, os Prestadores de Serviços estão a sofrer com este acréscimo exponencial, que é proveniente do número abismal de dispositivos e utilizadores que estão ligados à Internet, bem como das suas exigências por vários recursos e serviços de rede (como por exemplo, distribuição de conteúdo multimédia, segurança, mobilidade, etc.). Mais especificamente, estes estão com dificuldades em: introduzir novos serviços geradores de receitas; e otimizar e adaptar as suas infraestruturas mais caras, centros de processamento de dados, e redes empresariais e de longa distância (COMpuTIN, 2015). Estas redes continuam a ter sérios problemas (no que toca a agilidade, gestão, mobilidade e no tempo despendido para se adaptarem), que não foram corrigidos até ao momento. Portanto, foram propostos novos modelos de Virtualização de Funções da Rede (NFV) e tecnologias de Redes de Software Definidos (SDN) para solucionar gastos operacionais e de capital não otimizado, e limitações das redes (Lopez, 2014, Hakiri and Berthou, 2015). Para se ultrapassar tais adversidades, o Instituto Europeu de Normas de Telecomunicações (ETSI) e outras organizações propuseram novas arquiteturas de rede. De acordo com o ETSI, a NFV é uma técnica emergente e poderosa, com grande aplicabilidade, e com o objetivo de transformar a maneira como os operadores desenham as redes. Isto é alcançado pela evolução da tecnologia padrão de virtualização TI, de forma a consolidar vários tipos de equipamentos de redes como: servidores de grande volume, routers, switches e armazenamento (Xilouris et al., 2014). Nesta dissertação, foram usadas as soluções mais atuais de SDN e NFV, de forma a produzir um caso de uso que possa solucionar o crescimento do tráfego de rede e a excedência da sua capacidade máxima. Para o desenvolvimento e avalização da solução, foi instalada a plataforma de computação na nuvem OpenStack, de modo a implementar, gerir e testar um caso de uso de Live Migration.Global IP traffic has increased fivefold over the past five years, and will continue increasing threefold over the next five years. The overall IP traffic will grow at a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) nearly 3.9-fold from 2013 to 2018. Service Providers are experiencing the exponential growth of IP traffic that comes from the incredible increased number of devices and users who are connected to the internet along with their demands for various resources and network services like multimedia content distribution, security, mobility and else. Therefore, Service Providers are finding difficult to introduce new revenue generating services, optimize and adapt their expensive infrastructures, data centers, wide-area networks and enterprise networks (COMpuTIN, 2015). The networks continue to have serious known problems, such as, agility, manageability, mobility and time-to-application that have not been successfully addressed so far. Thus, novel Network Function Virtualization (NFV) models and Software-defined Networking (SDN) technologies have been proposed to solve the non-optimal capital and operational expenditures and network’s limitations (Lopez, 2014, Hakiri and Berthou, 2015). In order to solve these issues, the European Telecommunications Standards Institute (ETSI) and other standard organizations are proposing new network architecture approaches. According to ETSI, The Network Functions Virtualization is a powerful emerging technique with widespread applicability, aiming to transform the way that network operators design networks by evolving standard IT virtualization technology to consolidate many network equipment types: high volume servers, routers, switches and storage (Xilouris et al., 2014). In this thesis, the current Software-Defined Networking (SDN) and Network Function Virtualization (NFV) solutions were used in order to make a use case that can address the increasing of network traffic and exceeding its maximum capacity. To develop and evaluate the solution, OpenStack cloud computing platform was installed in order to deploy, manage and test a Live-Migration use-case

Cloud based testing of business applications and web services

This paper deals with testing of applications based on the principles of cloud computing. It is aimed to describe options of testing business software in clouds (cloud testing). It identifies the needs for cloud testing tools including multi-layer testing; service level agreement (SLA) based testing, large scale simulation, and on-demand test environment. In a cloud-based model, ICT services are distributed and accessed over networks such as intranet or internet, which offer large data centers deliver on demand, resources as a service, eliminating the need for investments in specific hardware, software, or on data center infrastructure. Businesses can apply those new technologies in the contest of intellectual capital management to lower the cost and increase competitiveness and also earnings. Based on comparison of the testing tools and techniques, the paper further investigates future trend of cloud based testing tools research and development. It is also important to say that this comparison and classification of testing tools describes a new area and it has not yet been done

M2: Malleable Metal as a Service

Existing bare-metal cloud services that provide users with physical nodes have a number of serious disadvantage over their virtual alternatives, including slow provisioning times, difficulty for users to release nodes and then reuse them to handle changes in demand, and poor tolerance to failures. We introduce M2, a bare-metal cloud service that uses network-mounted boot drives to overcome these disadvantages. We describe the architecture and implementation of M2 and compare its agility, scalability, and performance to existing systems. We show that M2 can reduce provisioning time by over 50% while offering richer functionality, and comparable run-time performance with respect to tools that provision images into local disks. M2 is open source and available at https://github.com/CCI-MOC/ims.Comment: IEEE International Conference on Cloud Engineering 201

Algorithms for advance bandwidth reservation in media production networks

Media production generally requires many geographically distributed actors (e.g., production houses, broadcasters, advertisers) to exchange huge amounts of raw video and audio data. Traditional distribution techniques, such as dedicated point-to-point optical links, are highly inefficient in terms of installation time and cost. To improve efficiency, shared media production networks that connect all involved actors over a large geographical area, are currently being deployed. The traffic in such networks is often predictable, as the timing and bandwidth requirements of data transfers are generally known hours or even days in advance. As such, the use of advance bandwidth reservation (AR) can greatly increase resource utilization and cost efficiency. In this paper, we propose an Integer Linear Programming formulation of the bandwidth scheduling problem, which takes into account the specific characteristics of media production networks, is presented. Two novel optimization algorithms based on this model are thoroughly evaluated and compared by means of in-depth simulation results