Building an Expert System for Evaluation of Commercial Cloud Services

Commercial Cloud services have been increasingly supplied to customers in industry. To facilitate customers' decision makings like cost-benefit analysis or Cloud provider selection, evaluation of those Cloud services are becoming more and more crucial. However, compared with evaluation of traditional computing systems, more challenges will inevitably appear when evaluating rapidly-changing and user-uncontrollable commercial Cloud services. This paper proposes an expert system for Cloud evaluation that addresses emerging evaluation challenges in the context of Cloud Computing. Based on the knowledge and data accumulated by exploring the existing evaluation work, this expert system has been conceptually validated to be able to give suggestions and guidelines for implementing new evaluation experiments. As such, users can conveniently obtain evaluation experiences by using this expert system, which is essentially able to make existing efforts in Cloud services evaluation reusable and sustainable.Comment: 8 page, Proceedings of the 2012 International Conference on Cloud and Service Computing (CSC 2012), pp. 168-175, Shanghai, China, November 22-24, 201

On Evaluating Commercial Cloud Services: A Systematic Review

Background: Cloud Computing is increasingly booming in industry with many competing providers and services. Accordingly, evaluation of commercial Cloud services is necessary. However, the existing evaluation studies are relatively chaotic. There exists tremendous confusion and gap between practices and theory about Cloud services evaluation. Aim: To facilitate relieving the aforementioned chaos, this work aims to synthesize the existing evaluation implementations to outline the state-of-the-practice and also identify research opportunities in Cloud services evaluation. Method: Based on a conceptual evaluation model comprising six steps, the Systematic Literature Review (SLR) method was employed to collect relevant evidence to investigate the Cloud services evaluation step by step. Results: This SLR identified 82 relevant evaluation studies. The overall data collected from these studies essentially represent the current practical landscape of implementing Cloud services evaluation, and in turn can be reused to facilitate future evaluation work. Conclusions: Evaluation of commercial Cloud services has become a world-wide research topic. Some of the findings of this SLR identify several research gaps in the area of Cloud services evaluation (e.g., the Elasticity and Security evaluation of commercial Cloud services could be a long-term challenge), while some other findings suggest the trend of applying commercial Cloud services (e.g., compared with PaaS, IaaS seems more suitable for customers and is particularly important in industry). This SLR study itself also confirms some previous experiences and reveals new Evidence-Based Software Engineering (EBSE) lessons

Scenarios for the development of smart grids in the UK: literature review

Smart grids are expected to play a central role in any transition to a low-carbon energy future, and much research is currently underway on practically every area of smart grids. However, it is evident that even basic aspects such as theoretical and operational definitions, are yet to be agreed upon and be clearly defined. Some aspects (efficient management of supply, including intermittent supply, two-way communication between the producer and user of electricity, use of IT technology to respond to and manage demand, and ensuring safe and secure electricity distribution) are more commonly accepted than others (such as smart meters) in defining what comprises a smart grid. It is clear that smart grid developments enjoy political and financial support both at UK and EU levels, and from the majority of related industries. The reasons for this vary and include the hope that smart grids will facilitate the achievement of carbon reduction targets, create new employment opportunities, and reduce costs relevant to energy generation (fewer power stations) and distribution (fewer losses and better stability). However, smart grid development depends on additional factors, beyond the energy industry. These relate to issues of public acceptability of relevant technologies and associated risks (e.g. data safety, privacy, cyber security), pricing, competition, and regulation; implying the involvement of a wide range of players such as the industry, regulators and consumers. The above constitute a complex set of variables and actors, and interactions between them. In order to best explore ways of possible deployment of smart grids, the use of scenarios is most adequate, as they can incorporate several parameters and variables into a coherent storyline. Scenarios have been previously used in the context of smart grids, but have traditionally focused on factors such as economic growth or policy evolution. Important additional socio-technical aspects of smart grids emerge from the literature review in this report and therefore need to be incorporated in our scenarios. These can be grouped into four (interlinked) main categories: supply side aspects, demand side aspects, policy and regulation, and technical aspects.

Parallel and Distributed Simulation from Many Cores to the Public Cloud (Extended Version)

In this tutorial paper, we will firstly review some basic simulation concepts and then introduce the parallel and distributed simulation techniques in view of some new challenges of today and tomorrow. More in particular, in the last years there has been a wide diffusion of many cores architectures and we can expect this trend to continue. On the other hand, the success of cloud computing is strongly promoting the everything as a service paradigm. Is parallel and distributed simulation ready for these new challenges? The current approaches present many limitations in terms of usability and adaptivity: there is a strong need for new evaluation metrics and for revising the currently implemented mechanisms. In the last part of the paper, we propose a new approach based on multi-agent systems for the simulation of complex systems. It is possible to implement advanced techniques such as the migration of simulated entities in order to build mechanisms that are both adaptive and very easy to use. Adaptive mechanisms are able to significantly reduce the communication cost in the parallel/distributed architectures, to implement load-balance techniques and to cope with execution environments that are both variable and dynamic. Finally, such mechanisms will be used to build simulations on top of unreliable cloud services.Comment: Tutorial paper published in the Proceedings of the International Conference on High Performance Computing and Simulation (HPCS 2011). Istanbul (Turkey), IEEE, July 2011. ISBN 978-1-61284-382-

CYCLONE Unified Deployment and Management of Federated, Multi-Cloud Applications

Various Cloud layers have to work in concert in order to manage and deploy complex multi-cloud applications, executing sophisticated workflows for Cloud resource deployment, activation, adjustment, interaction, and monitoring. While there are ample solutions for managing individual Cloud aspects (e.g. network controllers, deployment tools, and application security software), there are no well-integrated suites for managing an entire multi cloud environment with multiple providers and deployment models. This paper presents the CYCLONE architecture that integrates a number of existing solutions to create an open, unified, holistic Cloud management platform for multi-cloud applications, tailored to the needs of research organizations and SMEs. It discusses major challenges in providing a network and security infrastructure for the Intercloud and concludes with the demonstration how the architecture is implemented in a real life bioinformatics use case

Preparing to Preserve: Three Essential Steps to Building Experience with Long-Term Digital Preservation

Many organizations face complex questions of how to implement affordable and sustainable digital preservation practices. One strategic priority at the University Libraries at the University of Nevada-Las Vegas, United States, is increased focus toward preservation of unique digital assets, whether digitized from physical originals or born digital. A team comprised of experts from multiple functional library departments (including the special collections/archives area and the technology area) was established to help address this priority, and efforts are beginning to translate into operational practice. This work outlines a three-step approach: Partnership, Policy, Pilot taken by one academic research library to strategically build experience utilizing a collaborative team approach. Our experience included the formation of a team, education of all members, and a foundational attitude that decisions would be undertaken as partners rather than competing departments or units. The team’s work included the development of an initial digital preservation policy, helping to distill the organizational priority and values associated with digital preservation. Several pilot projects were initiated and completed, which provided realistic, first-person experience with digital preservation activities, surfaced questions, and set the stage for developing and refining sustainable workflows. This work will highlight key activities in our journey to date, with the hope that experience gained through this effort could be applicable, in whole or part, to other organizations regardless of their size or capacity

Cloud-based manufacturing-as-a-service environment for customized products

This paper describes the paradigm of cloud-based services which are used to envisage a new generation of configurable manufacturing systems. Unlike previous approaches to mass customization (that simply reprogram individual machines to produce specific shapes) the system reported here is intended to enable the customized production of technologically complex products by dynamically configuring a manufacturing supply chain. In order to realize such a system, the resources (i.e. production capabilities) have to be designed to support collaboration throughout the whole production network, including their adaption to customer-specific production. The flexible service composition as well as the appropriate IT services required for its realization show many analogies with common cloud computing approaches. For this reason, this paper describes the motivation and challenges that are related to cloud-based manufacturing and illustrates emerging technologies supporting this vision byestablishing an appropriate Manufacturing-as-a-Service environment based on manufacturing service descriptions