Performance-oriented Cloud Provisioning: Taxonomy and Survey

Cloud computing is being viewed as the technology of today and the future. Through this paradigm, the customers gain access to shared computing resources located in remote data centers that are hosted by cloud providers (CP). This technology allows for provisioning of various resources such as virtual machines (VM), physical machines, processors, memory, network, storage and software as per the needs of customers. Application providers (AP), who are customers of the CP, deploy applications on the cloud infrastructure and then these applications are used by the end-users. To meet the fluctuating application workload demands, dynamic provisioning is essential and this article provides a detailed literature survey of dynamic provisioning within cloud systems with focus on application performance. The well-known types of provisioning and the associated problems are clearly and pictorially explained and the provisioning terminology is clarified. A very detailed and general cloud provisioning classification is presented, which views provisioning from different perspectives, aiding in understanding the process inside-out. Cloud dynamic provisioning is explained by considering resources, stakeholders, techniques, technologies, algorithms, problems, goals and more.Comment: 14 pages, 3 figures, 3 table

Virtual Cluster Management for Analysis of Geographically Distributed and Immovable Data

Thesis (Ph.D.) - Indiana University, Informatics and Computing, 2015Scenarios exist in the era of Big Data where computational analysis needs to utilize widely distributed and remote compute clusters, especially when the data sources are sensitive or extremely large, and thus unable to move. A large dataset in Malaysia could be ecologically sensitive, for instance, and unable to be moved outside the country boundaries. Controlling an analysis experiment in this virtual cluster setting can be difficult on multiple levels: with setup and control, with managing behavior of the virtual cluster, and with interoperability issues across the compute clusters. Further, datasets can be distributed among clusters, or even across data centers, so that it becomes critical to utilize data locality information to optimize the performance of data-intensive jobs. Finally, datasets are increasingly sensitive and tied to certain administrative boundaries, though once the data has been processed, the aggregated or statistical result can be shared across the boundaries. This dissertation addresses management and control of a widely distributed virtual cluster having sensitive or otherwise immovable data sets through a controller. The Virtual Cluster Controller (VCC) gives control back to the researcher. It creates virtual clusters across multiple cloud platforms. In recognition of sensitive data, it can establish a single network overlay over widely distributed clusters. We define a novel class of data, notably immovable data that we call "pinned data", where the data is treated as a first-class citizen instead of being moved to where needed. We draw from our earlier work with a hierarchical data processing model, Hierarchical MapReduce (HMR), to process geographically distributed data, some of which are pinned data. The applications implemented in HMR use extended MapReduce model where computations are expressed as three functions: Map, Reduce, and GlobalReduce. Further, by facilitating information sharing among resources, applications, and data, the overall performance is improved. Experimental results show that the overhead of VCC is minimum. The HMR outperforms traditional MapReduce model while processing a particular class of applications. The evaluations also show that information sharing between resources and application through the VCC shortens the hierarchical data processing time, as well satisfying the constraints on the pinned data

Using Workload Prediction and Federation to Increase Cloud Utilization

The wide-spread adoption of cloud computing has changed how large-scale computing infrastructure is built and managed. Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) clouds consolidate different separate workloads onto a shared platform and provide a consistent quality of service by overprovisioning capacity. This additional capacity, however, remains idle for extended periods of time and represents a drag on system efficiency.The smaller scale of private IaaS clouds compared to public clouds exacerbates overprovisioning inefficiencies as opportunities for workload consolidation in private clouds are limited. Federation and cycle harvesting capabilities from computational grids help to improve efficiency, but to date have seen only limited adoption in the cloud due to a fundamental mismatch between the usage models of grids and clouds. Computational grids provide high throughput of queued batch jobs on a best-effort basis and enforce user priorities through dynamic job preemption, while IaaS clouds provide immediate feedback to user requests and make ahead-of-time guarantees about resource availability.We present a novel method to enable workload federation across IaaS clouds that overcomes this mismatch between grid and cloud usage models and improves system efficiency while also offering availability guarantees. We develop a new method for faster-than-realtime simulation of IaaS clouds to make predictions about system utilization and leverage this method to estimate the future availability of preemptible resources in the cloud. We then use these estimates to perform careful admission control and provide ahead-of-time bounds on the preemption probability of federated jobs executing on preemptible resources. Finally, we build an end-to-end prototype that addresses practical issues of workload federation and evaluate the prototype's efficacy using real-world traces from big data and compute-intensive production workloads

Theory and practice of rapid elasticity in cloud applications

This thesis is a study of the theory of scalability and its application in an infrastructure as a service (IaaS) cloud context. The cloud based utility computing paradigm is presented along with how scalability principles are applied in the cloud. The differences of scalability in general and the cloud concept of elasticity are discussed. A quality of elasticity (QoE) metric is developed to facilitate factual discussion and comparison of different cloud platforms' elasticity capabilities and the effectiveness of elastic scaling strategies. The metric is based on business requirements expressed as preference functions over a set of lower level metrics. Multi-criteria analysis is applied to these possibly conflicting preferences to arrive at a unified value of utility based on weighting the sum of the preferences. QoE reflects the utility of the system over time. The concept of an elasticity controller application is presented and a prototype implementation described in order to exercise the QoE metric. Two load testing scenarios are executed against a simple test application whose deployment is managed by the prototype controller. The elastic scaling behavior of the system is analyzed in terms of the QoE results to confirm the prototype is functional and to find areas of improvement

Virtual Machine Image Management for Elastic Resource Usage in Grid Computing

Grid Computing has evolved from an academic concept to a powerful paradigm in the area of high performance computing (HPC). Over the last few years, powerful Grid computing solutions were developed that allow the execution of computational tasks on distributed computing resources. Grid computing has recently attracted many commercial customers. To enable commercial customers to be able to execute sensitive data in the Grid, strong security mechanisms must be put in place to secure the customers' data. In contrast, the development of Cloud Computing, which entered the scene in 2006, was driven by industry: it was designed with respect to security from the beginning. Virtualization technology is used to separate the users e.g., by putting the different users of a system inside a virtual machine, which prevents them from accessing other users' data. The use of virtualization in the context of Grid computing has been examined early and was found to be a promising approach to counter the security threats that have appeared with commercial customers. One main part of the work presented in this thesis is the Image Creation Station (ICS), a component which allows users to administer their virtual execution environments (virtual machines) themselves and which is responsible for managing and distributing the virtual machines in the entire system. In contrast to Cloud computing, which was designed to allow even inexperienced users to execute their computational tasks in the Cloud easily, Grid computing is much more complex to use. The ICS makes it easier to use the Grid by overcoming traditional limitations like installing needed software on the compute nodes that users use to execute the computational tasks. This allows users to bring commercial software to the Grid for the first time, without the need for local administrators to install the software to computing nodes that are accessible by all users. Moreover, the administrative burden is shifted from the local Grid site's administrator to the users or experienced software providers that allow the provision of individually tailored virtual machines to each user. But the ICS is not only responsible for enabling users to manage their virtual machines themselves, it also ensures that the virtual machines are available on every site that is part of the distributed Grid system. A second aspect of the presented solution focuses on the elasticity of the system by automatically acquiring free external resources depending on the system's current workload. In contrast to existing systems, the presented approach allows the system's administrator to add or remove resource sets during runtime without needing to restart the entire system. Moreover, the presented solution allows users to not only use existing Grid resources but allows them to scale out to Cloud resources and use these resources on-demand. By ensuring that unused resources are shut down as soon as possible, the computational costs of a given task are minimized. In addition, the presented solution allows each user to specify which resources can be used to execute a particular job. This is useful when a job processes sensitive data e.g., that is not allowed to leave the company. To obtain a comparable function in today's systems, a user must submit her computational task to a particular resource set, losing the ability to automatically schedule if more than one set of resources can be used. In addition, the proposed solution prioritizes each set of resources by taking different metrics into account (e.g. the level of trust or computational costs) and tries to schedule the job to resources with the highest priority first. It is notable that the priority often mimics the physical distance from the resources to the user: a locally available Cluster usually has a higher priority due to the high level of trust and the computational costs, that are usually lower than the costs of using Cloud resources. Therefore, this scheduling strategy minimizes the costs of job execution by improving security at the same time since data is not necessarily transferred to remote resources and the probability of attacks by malicious external users is minimized. Bringing both components together results in a system that adapts automatically to the current workload by using external (e.g., Cloud) resources together with existing locally available resources or Grid sites and provides individually tailored virtual execution environments to the system's users

An Intelligent Robust Mouldable Scheduler for HPC & Elastic Environments

Traditional scheduling techniques are of a by-gone era and do not cater for the dynamism of new and emerging computing paradigms. Budget constraints now push researchers to migrate their workloads to public clouds or to buy into shared computing services as funding for large capital expenditures are few and far between. The sites still hosting large or shared computing infrastructure have to ensure that the system utilisation and efficiency is as high as ossible. However, the efficiency can not come at the cost of quality of service as the availability of public clouds now means that users can move away. This thesis presents a novel scheduling system to improve job turn-around-time. The Robust Mouldable Scheduler outlined in these pages utilises real application benchmarks to profile system performance and predict job execution times at different allocations, something no other scheduler does at present. The system is able to make an allocation decisions ensuring the jobs can fit into spaces available on the system using fewer resources without delaying the job completion time. The results demonstrate significant improvement in workload turn-around-times using real High Performance Computing (HPC) trace logs. Utilising three years of the University of Huddersfield trace logs the mouldable scheduler consistently simulated faster workload completion. Further, the results establish that by not relying on the user to suggest resource allocations for jobs the system is able to mitigate bad-put into the system leading to improved efficiency. A thorough investigation of Research Computing Systems (RCS), workload management systems, scheduling algorithms and strategies, benchmarking and profiling toolkits, and simulators is presented to establish the state of the art. Within this thesis a method to profile applications and workloads that leverages common open-source tools on HPC systems is presented. The resultant toolkit is used to profile the University of Huddersfield workload. This workload forms the basis to evaluate the mouldable scheduler. The research includes advance computing paradigms such as utilising Artificial Intelligence methods to improve the efficiency of the scheduler, or Surge Computing, where workloads are scaled beyond institutional firewalls through elastic compute systems

DRIVE: A Distributed Economic Meta-Scheduler for the Federation of Grid and Cloud Systems

The computational landscape is littered with islands of disjoint resource providers including commercial Clouds, private Clouds, national Grids, institutional Grids, clusters, and data centers. These providers are independent and isolated due to a lack of communication and coordination, they are also often proprietary without standardised interfaces, protocols, or execution environments. The lack of standardisation and global transparency has the effect of binding consumers to individual providers. With the increasing ubiquity of computation providers there is an opportunity to create federated architectures that span both Grid and Cloud computing providers effectively creating a global computing infrastructure. In order to realise this vision, secure and scalable mechanisms to coordinate resource access are required. This thesis proposes a generic meta-scheduling architecture to facilitate federated resource allocation in which users can provision resources from a range of heterogeneous (service) providers. Efficient resource allocation is difficult in large scale distributed environments due to the inherent lack of centralised control. In a Grid model, local resource managers govern access to a pool of resources within a single administrative domain but have only a local view of the Grid and are unable to collaborate when allocating jobs. Meta-schedulers act at a higher level able to submit jobs to multiple resource managers, however they are most often deployed on a per-client basis and are therefore concerned with only their allocations, essentially competing against one another. In a federated environment the widespread adoption of utility computing models seen in commercial Cloud providers has re-motivated the need for economically aware meta-schedulers. Economies provide a way to represent the different goals and strategies that exist in a competitive distributed environment. The use of economic allocation principles effectively creates an open service market that provides efficient allocation and incentives for participation. The major contributions of this thesis are the architecture and prototype implementation of the DRIVE meta-scheduler. DRIVE is a Virtual Organisation (VO) based distributed economic metascheduler in which members of the VO collaboratively allocate services or resources. Providers joining the VO contribute obligation services to the VO. These contributed services are in effect membership “dues” and are used in the running of the VOs operations – for example allocation, advertising, and general management. DRIVE is independent from a particular class of provider (Service, Grid, or Cloud) or specific economic protocol. This independence enables allocation in federated environments composed of heterogeneous providers in vastly different scenarios. Protocol independence facilitates the use of arbitrary protocols based on specific requirements and infrastructural availability. For instance, within a single organisation where internal trust exists, users can achieve maximum allocation performance by choosing a simple economic protocol. In a global utility Grid no such trust exists. The same meta-scheduler architecture can be used with a secure protocol which ensures the allocation is carried out fairly in the absence of trust. DRIVE establishes contracts between participants as the result of allocation. A contract describes individual requirements and obligations of each party. A unique two stage contract negotiation protocol is used to minimise the effect of allocation latency. In addition due to the co-op nature of the architecture and the use of secure privacy preserving protocols, DRIVE can be deployed in a distributed environment without requiring large scale dedicated resources. This thesis presents several other contributions related to meta-scheduling and open service markets. To overcome the perceived performance limitations of economic systems four high utilisation strategies have been developed and evaluated. Each strategy is shown to improve occupancy, utilisation and profit using synthetic workloads based on a production Grid trace. The gRAVI service wrapping toolkit is presented to address the difficulty web enabling existing applications. The gRAVI toolkit has been extended for this thesis such that it creates economically aware (DRIVE-enabled) services that can be transparently traded in a DRIVE market without requiring developer input. The final contribution of this thesis is the definition and architecture of a Social Cloud – a dynamic Cloud computing infrastructure composed of virtualised resources contributed by members of a Social network. The Social Cloud prototype is based on DRIVE and highlights the ease in which dynamic DRIVE markets can be created and used in different domains