Characterizing cloud federation for enhancing providers' profit

Cloud federation has been proposed as a new paradigm that allows providers to avoid the limitation of owning only a restricted amount of resources, which forces them to reject new customers when they have not enough local resources to fulfill their customers’ requirements. Federation allows a provider to dynamically outsource resources to other providers in response to demand variations. It also allows a provider that has underused resources to rent part of them to other providers. Both things could make the provider to get more profit when used adequately. This requires that the provider has a clear understanding of the potential of each federation decision, in order to choose the most convenient depending on the environment conditions. In this paper, we present a complete characterization of providers’ federation in the Cloud, including decision equations to outsource resources to other providers, rent free resources to other providers (i.e. insourcing), or shutdown unused nodes to save power, and we characterize these decisions as a function of several parameters. Then, we demonstrate in the evaluation section how a provider can enhance its profit by using these equations to exploit federation, and how the different parameters influence which is the best decision on each situation.Peer ReviewedPostprint (published version

Планирование загрузки ресурсов центра обработки данных на основе статистических данных

Якість обслуговування клієнтів залежить від процедури підтримки прикладних програм в центрі обробки даних постачальника зв'язку. У статті розглядається підхід контролю динамічного використання ресурсів для забезпечення обслуговування вхідного потоку, який враховує випадковий характер надходження заявок і використовує короткострокові і довгострокові статистичні навантаження. Запропонований підхід складається з двох методів, які керують кількістю обслуговуючих вузлів. Результати моделювання управління технічними ресурсами були представлені для інфраструктури ЦОД провайдера зв'язку, що доводить ефективність запропонованих методів.The customer service quality depends on the procedure of the application maintenance in data center of the communication provider. In the article the control approach of dynamic resource involvement has been suggested in order to ensure the input flow maintenance that takes into account the random nature of applications’ inflow and utilizes both short-term and long-term load statistics. The proposed approach consists of two methods that manage the number of the implicated serving nodes. The first one verifies the resource amount adequacy, provides the evaluation of input load’s dynamics based on the short-term statistics as well as the current state of the technical facilities. The second one accounts for the long-term statistics according to which the implication of additional resources can be scheduled during the load peaks. The simulation results of technical resources management have been presented for the data center infrastructure of the communication provider, that prove the effectiveness of the proposed methods.Качество обслуживания клиентов зависит от процедуры поддержки приложений в центре обработки данных поставщика связи. В статье рассматривается подход контроля динамического использования ресурсов для обеспечения обслуживания входящего потока, который принимает во внимание случайный характер поступления заявок и использует краткосрочные и долгосрочные статистические нагрузки. Предложенный подход состоит из двух методов, которые управляют количеством обслуживающих узлов. Результаты моделирования управления техническими ресурсами были представлены для инфраструктуры ЦОД провайдера связи, что доказывает эффективность предложенных методов

Планування завантаження ресурсів центру обробки даних на основі статистичних даних

The customer service quality depends on the procedure of the application maintenance in data center of the communication provider. In the article the control approach of dynamic resource involvement has been suggested in order to ensure the input flow maintenance that takes into account the random nature of applications’ inflow and utilizes both short-term and long-term load statistics. The proposed approach consists of two methods that manage the number of the implicated serving nodes. The first one verifies the resource amount adequacy, provides the evaluation of input load’s dynamics based on the short-term statistics as well as the current state of the technical facilities. The second one accounts for the long-term statistics according to which the implication of additional resources can be scheduled during the load peaks. The simulation results of technical resources management have been presented for the data center infrastructure of the communication provider, that prove the effectiveness of the proposed methods.Качество обслуживания клиентов зависит от процедуры поддержки приложений в центре обработки данных поставщика связи. В статье рассматривается подход контроля динамического использования ресурсов для обеспечения обслуживания входящего потока, который принимает во внимание случайный характер поступления заявок и использует краткосрочные и долгосрочные статистические нагрузки. Предложенный подход состоит из двух методов, которые управляют количеством обслуживающих узлов. Результаты моделирования управления техническими ресурсами были представлены для инфраструктуры ЦОД провайдера связи, что доказывает эффективность предложенных методов.Якість обслуговування клієнтів залежить від процедури підтримки прикладних програм в центрі обробки даних постачальника зв'язку. У статті розглядається підхід контролю динамічного використання ресурсів для забезпечення обслуговування вхідного потоку, який враховує випадковий характер надходження заявок і використовує короткострокові і довгострокові статистичні навантаження. Запропонований підхід складається з двох методів, які керують кількістю обслуговуючих вузлів. Результати моделювання управління технічними ресурсами були представлені для інфраструктури ЦОД провайдера зв'язку, що доводить ефективність запропонованих методів

Vision: a Lightweight Computing Model for Fine-Grained Cloud Computing

Cloud systems differ fundamentally in how they offer and charge for resources. While some systems provide a generic programming abstraction at coarse granularity, e.g., a virtual machine rented by the hour, others offer specialized abstractions with fine-grained accounting on a per-request basis. In this paper, we explore Tasklets, an abstraction for instances of short-duration, generic computations that migrate from a host requiring computation to hosts that are willing to provide computation. Tasklets enable fine-grained accounting of resource usage, enabling us to build infrastructure that supports trading computing resources according to various economic models. This computation model is especially attractive in settings where mobile devices can utilize resources in the cloud to mitigate local resource constraints

Towards a Good Cloud Computing Provider other than Choosing through Data Security and Privacy Capability Factor

Abstract Cloud computing (CC) is the assumed miracle solution for establishments who are keen on cost effective automation and is brought to a users door step through cloud computer service providers. There are many areas where a user should consider when selecting a vendor for a cloud services solution, from the vendor's infrastructure and computing architecture framework to the jurisdiction within which the solution resides. In as much as its uptake is sky rocketing, there is a major challenge in selecting a provider who fits the bill. Most practitioners falsely believe that as long as a data security and privacy is mitigated then all is well. There are many other factors that users should confirm with the provider of their ability before any contract is signed of which this paper discusses. Issues to do with Intellectual property, jurisdiction, and portability of content are mentioned. Disappointed users with failed projects who end up with court cases are also included in the paper

Towards an Environment for Efficient and Transparent Virtual Machine Operations: The ENTICE Approach

Cloud computing is based on Virtual Machines (VM) or containers, which provide their own software execution environment that can be deployed by facilitating technologies on top of various physical hardware. The use of VMs or containers represents an efficient way to automatize the overall software engineering and operation life-cycle. Some of the benefits include elasticity and high scalability, which increases the utilization efficiency and decreases the operational costs. VMs or containers as software artifacts are created using provider-specific templates and are stored in proprietary or public repositories for further use. However, technology specific choices may reduce their portability, lead to a vendor lock-in, particularly when applications need to run in federated Clouds. In this paper we present the current state of development of the novel concept of a VM repository and operational environment for federated Clouds named ENTICE. The ENTICE environment has been designed to receive unmodified and functionally complete VM images from its users, and transparently tailor and optimise them for specific Cloud infrastructures with respect to their size, configuration, and geographical distribution, such that they are loaded, delivered, and executed faster and with improved QoS compared to their current behaviour. Furthermore, in this work a specific use case scenario for the ENTICE environment has been provided and the underlying novel technologies have been presented

A Trust-Based Approach for Management of Dynamic QoS Violations in Cloud Federation Environments

Cloud Federation is an emerging technology where Cloud Service Providers (CSPs) offering specialized services to customers collaborate in order to reap the real benefits of Cloud Computing. When a CSP in the Cloud Federation runs out of resources, it can get the required resources from other partners in the federation. Normally, there will be QoS agreements between the partners in the federation for the resource sharing. In this paper, we propose a trust based mechanism for the management of dynamic QoS violations, when one CSP requests resources from another CSP in the federation. In this work, we have implemented the partner selection process, when one CSP does not have enough resources, using the Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP) and the Technique for Order Preference by Similarity to Ideal Solution (TOPSIS) methods, and also considering the trust values of various CSPs in the federation. We have also implemented the Single Sign-On (SSO) authentication in the cloud federation using the Fully Hashed Menezes-Qu-Vanstone (FHMQV) protocol and AES-256 algorithm. The proposed trust-based approach is used to dynamically manage the QoS violations among the partners in the federation. We have implemented the proposed approach using the CloudSim toolkit, and the analysis of the results are also given

Security-Induced Lock-In in the Cloud

Cloud services providers practice security-induced lock-in when employing cryptography and tamper-resistance to limit the portability and interoperability of users’ data and applications. Moreover, security-induced lock-in and users’ anti-lock-in strategies intersect within the context of platform competition. When users deploy anti-lock in strategies, such as using a hybrid cloud, a leader–follower pricing framework increases profits for cloud services providers relative to Nash equilibrium prices. This creates a second-mover advantage, as the follower’s increase in profits exceeds that of the leader owing to the potential for price undercutting. By contrast, introducing or enhancing security-induced lock-in creates both an increase in profits and a first-mover advantage. Cloud services providers therefore favor security-induced lock-in over price leadership. More broadly, we show why standardization of semantics, technologies, and interfaces is a nonstarter for cloud services providers

A Proposal of Business Model Design Parameters for Future Internet Carriers

Future Internet evolution requires innovative strategic stances and the design of original business models from actors involved in the ecosystem. The study focuses on Internet Carriers, recently striving to make their business sustainable, and proposes to enclose in a single reference framework all the critical levers, either consolidated or innovative, such actors can employ in order to design their value proposition, value network integration, and financial configuration. The framework grounds its findings on multiple case studies, and, by presenting an insightful list of business model parameters for Carriers, sheds light on key emerging strategic and tactical trends in the Internet interconnections market