SLA-Oriented Resource Provisioning for Cloud Computing: Challenges, Architecture, and Solutions

Cloud computing systems promise to offer subscription-oriented, enterprise-quality computing services to users worldwide. With the increased demand for delivering services to a large number of users, they need to offer differentiated services to users and meet their quality expectations. Existing resource management systems in data centers are yet to support Service Level Agreement (SLA)-oriented resource allocation, and thus need to be enhanced to realize cloud computing and utility computing. In addition, no work has been done to collectively incorporate customer-driven service management, computational risk management, and autonomic resource management into a market-based resource management system to target the rapidly changing enterprise requirements of Cloud computing. This paper presents vision, challenges, and architectural elements of SLA-oriented resource management. The proposed architecture supports integration of marketbased provisioning policies and virtualisation technologies for flexible allocation of resources to applications. The performance results obtained from our working prototype system shows the feasibility and effectiveness of SLA-based resource provisioning in Clouds.Comment: 10 pages, 7 figures, Conference Keynote Paper: 2011 IEEE International Conference on Cloud and Service Computing (CSC 2011, IEEE Press, USA), Hong Kong, China, December 12-14, 201

An interoperable and self-adaptive approach for SLA-based service virtualization in heterogeneous Cloud environments

Cloud computing is a newly emerged computing infrastructure that builds on the latest achievements of diverse research areas, such as Grid computing, Service-oriented computing, business process management and virtualization. An important characteristic of Cloud-based services is the provision of non-functional guarantees in the form of Service Level Agreements (SLAs), such as guarantees on execution time or price. However, due to system malfunctions, changing workload conditions, hard- and software failures, established SLAs can be violated. In order to avoid costly SLA violations, flexible and adaptive SLA attainment strategies are needed. In this paper we present a self-manageable architecture for SLA-based service virtualization that provides a way to ease interoperable service executions in a diverse, heterogeneous, distributed and virtualized world of services. We demonstrate in this paper that the combination of negotiation, brokering and deployment using SLA-aware extensions and autonomic computing principles are required for achieving reliable and efficient service operation in distributed environments. © 2012 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved

DEPAS: A Decentralized Probabilistic Algorithm for Auto-Scaling

The dynamic provisioning of virtualized resources offered by cloud computing infrastructures allows applications deployed in a cloud environment to automatically increase and decrease the amount of used resources. This capability is called auto-scaling and its main purpose is to automatically adjust the scale of the system that is running the application to satisfy the varying workload with minimum resource utilization. The need for auto-scaling is particularly important during workload peaks, in which applications may need to scale up to extremely large-scale systems. Both the research community and the main cloud providers have already developed auto-scaling solutions. However, most research solutions are centralized and not suitable for managing large-scale systems, moreover cloud providers' solutions are bound to the limitations of a specific provider in terms of resource prices, availability, reliability, and connectivity. In this paper we propose DEPAS, a decentralized probabilistic auto-scaling algorithm integrated into a P2P architecture that is cloud provider independent, thus allowing the auto-scaling of services over multiple cloud infrastructures at the same time. Our simulations, which are based on real service traces, show that our approach is capable of: (i) keeping the overall utilization of all the instantiated cloud resources in a target range, (ii) maintaining service response times close to the ones obtained using optimal centralized auto-scaling approaches.Comment: Submitted to Springer Computin

Energy-Efficient Management of Data Center Resources for Cloud Computing: A Vision, Architectural Elements, and Open Challenges

Cloud computing is offering utility-oriented IT services to users worldwide. Based on a pay-as-you-go model, it enables hosting of pervasive applications from consumer, scientific, and business domains. However, data centers hosting Cloud applications consume huge amounts of energy, contributing to high operational costs and carbon footprints to the environment. Therefore, we need Green Cloud computing solutions that can not only save energy for the environment but also reduce operational costs. This paper presents vision, challenges, and architectural elements for energy-efficient management of Cloud computing environments. We focus on the development of dynamic resource provisioning and allocation algorithms that consider the synergy between various data center infrastructures (i.e., the hardware, power units, cooling and software), and holistically work to boost data center energy efficiency and performance. In particular, this paper proposes (a) architectural principles for energy-efficient management of Clouds; (b) energy-efficient resource allocation policies and scheduling algorithms considering quality-of-service expectations, and devices power usage characteristics; and (c) a novel software technology for energy-efficient management of Clouds. We have validated our approach by conducting a set of rigorous performance evaluation study using the CloudSim toolkit. The results demonstrate that 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: 12 pages, 5 figures,Proceedings of the 2010 International Conference on Parallel and Distributed Processing Techniques and Applications (PDPTA 2010), Las Vegas, USA, July 12-15, 201

A Self-adaptive Agent-based System for Cloud Platforms

Cloud computing is a model for enabling on-demand network access to a shared pool of computing resources, that can be dynamically allocated and released with minimal effort. However, this task can be complex in highly dynamic environments with various resources to allocate for an increasing number of different users requirements. In this work, we propose a Cloud architecture based on a multi-agent system exhibiting a self-adaptive behavior to address the dynamic resource allocation. This self-adaptive system follows a MAPE-K approach to reason and act, according to QoS, Cloud service information, and propagated run-time information, to detect QoS degradation and make better resource allocation decisions. We validate our proposed Cloud architecture by simulation. Results show that it can properly allocate resources to reduce energy consumption, while satisfying the users demanded QoS

Autonomie, sécurité et QoS de bout en bout dans un environnement de Cloud Computing

Today, Cloud Networking is one of the recent research areas within the Cloud Computing research communities. The main challenges of Cloud Networking concern Quality of Service (QoS) and security guarantee as well as its management in conformance with a corresponding Service Level Agreement (SLA). In this thesis, we propose a framework for resource allocation according to an end-to-end SLA established between a Cloud Service User (CSU) and several Cloud Service Providers (CSPs) within a Cloud Networking environment (Inter-Cloud Broker and Federation architectures). We focus on NaaS and IaaS Cloud services. Then, we propose the self-establishing of several kinds of SLAs and the self-management of the corresponding Cloud resources in conformance with these SLAs using specific autonomic cloud managers. In addition, we extend the proposed architectures and the corresponding SLAs in order to deliver a service level taking into account security guarantee. Moreover, we allow autonomic cloud managers to expand the self-management objectives to security functions (self-protection) while studying the impact of the proposed security on QoS guarantee. Finally, our proposed architecture is validated by different simulation scenarios. We consider, within these simulations, videoconferencing and intensive computing applications in order to provide them with QoS and security guarantee in a Cloud self-management environment. The obtained results show that our contributions enable good performances for these applications. In particular, we observe that the Broker architecture is the most economical while ensuring QoS and security requirements. In addition, we observe that Cloud self-management enables violations and penalties’ reduction as well as limiting security impact on QoS guarantee.De nos jours, le Cloud Networking est considéré comme étant l'un des domaines de recherche innovants au sein de la communauté de recherche du Cloud Computing. Les principaux défis dans un environnement de Cloud Networking concernent non seulement la garantie de qualité de service (QoS) et de sécurité mais aussi sa gestion en conformité avec un accord de niveau de service (SLA) correspondant. Dans cette thèse, nous proposons un Framework pour l'allocation des ressources conformément à un SLA établi de bout en bout entre un utilisateur de services Cloud (CSU) et plusieurs fournisseurs de services Cloud (CSP) dans un environnement de Cloud Networking (architectures d’inter-Cloud Broker et Fédération). Nos travaux se concentrent sur les services Cloud de types NaaS et IaaS. Ainsi, nous proposons l'auto-établissement de plusieurs types de SLA ainsi que la gestion autonome des ressources de Cloud correspondantes en conformité avec ces SLA en utilisant des gestionnaires autonomes spécifiques de Cloud. De plus, nous étendons les architectures et les SLA proposés pour offrir un niveau de service intégrant une garantie de sécurité. Ainsi, nous permettons aux gestionnaires autonomes de Cloud d'élargir leurs objectifs de gestion autonome aux fonctions de sécurité (auto-protection) tout en étudiant l'impact de la sécurité proposée sur la garantie de QoS. Enfin, nous validons notre architecture avec différents scénarios de simulation. Nous considérons dans le cadre de ces simulations des applications de vidéoconférence et de calcul intensif afin de leur fournir une garantie de QoS et de sécurité dans un environnement de gestion autonome des ressources du Cloud. Les résultats obtenus montrent que nos contributions permettent de bonnes performances pour ce type d’applications. En particulier, nous observons que l'architecture de type Broker est la plus économique, tout en assurant les exigences de QoS et de sécurité. De plus, nous observons que la gestion autonome des ressources du Cloud permet la réduction des violations, des pénalités et limite l'impact de la sécurité sur la garantie de la QoS

Management and Service-aware Networking Architectures (MANA) for Future Internet Position Paper: System Functions, Capabilities and Requirements

Future Internet (FI) research and development threads have recently been gaining momentum all over the world and as such the international race to create a new generation Internet is in full swing: GENI, Asia Future Internet, Future Internet Forum Korea, European Union Future Internet Assembly (FIA). This is a position paper identifying the research orientation with a time horizon of 10 years, together with the key challenges for the capabilities in the Management and Service-aware Networking Architectures (MANA) part of the Future Internet (FI) allowing for parallel and federated Internet(s)