Proactive cloud management for highly heterogeneous multi-cloud infrastructures

Various literature studies demonstrated that the cloud computing paradigm can help to improve availability and performance of applications subject to the problem of software anomalies. Indeed, the cloud resource provisioning model enables users to rapidly access new processing resources, even distributed over different geographical regions, that can be promptly used in the case of, e.g., crashes or hangs of running machines, as well as to balance the load in the case of overloaded machines. Nevertheless, managing a complex geographically-distributed cloud deploy could be a complex and time-consuming task. Autonomic Cloud Manager (ACM) Framework is an autonomic framework for supporting proactive management of applications deployed over multiple cloud regions. It uses machine learning models to predict failures of virtual machines and to proactively redirect the load to healthy machines/cloud regions. In this paper, we study different policies to perform efficient proactive load balancing across cloud regions in order to mitigate the effect of software anomalies. These policies use predictions about the mean time to failure of virtual machines. We consider the case of heterogeneous cloud regions, i.e regions with different amount of resources, and we provide an experimental assessment of these policies in the context of ACM Framework

DEPENDABILITY BENCHMARKING OF NETWORK FUNCTION VIRTUALIZATION

Network Function Virtualization (NFV) is an emerging networking paradigm that aims to reduce costs and time-to-market, improve manageability, and foster competition and innovative services. NFV exploits virtualization and cloud computing technologies to turn physical network functions into Virtualized Network Functions (VNFs), which will be implemented in software, and will run as Virtual Machines (VMs) on commodity hardware located in high-performance data centers, namely Network Function Virtualization Infrastructures (NFVIs). The NFV paradigm relies on cloud computing and virtualization technologies to provide carrier-grade services, i.e., the ability of a service to be highly reliable and available, within fast and automatic failure recovery mechanisms. The availability of many virtualization solutions for NFV poses the question on which virtualization technology should be adopted for NFV, in order to fulfill the requirements described above. Currently, there are limited solutions for analyzing, in quantitative terms, the performance and reliability trade-offs, which are important concerns for the adoption of NFV. This thesis deals with assessment of the reliability and of the performance of NFV systems. It proposes a methodology, which includes context, measures, and faultloads, to conduct dependability benchmarks in NFV, according to the general principles of dependability benchmarking. To this aim, a fault injection framework for the virtualization technologies has been designed and implemented for the virtualized technologies being used as case studies in this thesis. This framework is successfully used to conduct an extensive experimental campaign, where we compare two candidate virtualization technologies for NFV adoption: the commercial, hypervisor-based virtualization platform VMware vSphere, and the open-source, container-based virtualization platform Docker. These technologies are assessed in the context of a high-availability, NFV-oriented IP Multimedia Subsystem (IMS). The analysis of experimental results reveal that i) fault management mechanisms are crucial in NFV, in order to provide accurate failure detection and start the subsequent failover actions, and ii) fault injection proves to be valuable way to introduce uncommon scenarios in the NFVI, which can be fundamental to provide a high reliable service in production

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)

Quantifying cloud performance and dependability:Taxonomy, metric design, and emerging challenges

In only a decade, cloud computing has emerged from a pursuit for a service-driven information and communication technology (ICT), becoming a significant fraction of the ICT market. Responding to the growth of the market, many alternative cloud services and their underlying systems are currently vying for the attention of cloud users and providers. To make informed choices between competing cloud service providers, permit the cost-benefit analysis of cloud-based systems, and enable system DevOps to evaluate and tune the performance of these complex ecosystems, appropriate performance metrics, benchmarks, tools, and methodologies are necessary. This requires re-examining old system properties and considering new system properties, possibly leading to the re-design of classic benchmarking metrics such as expressing performance as throughput and latency (response time). In this work, we address these requirements by focusing on four system properties: (i) elasticity of the cloud service, to accommodate large variations in the amount of service requested, (ii) performance isolation between the tenants of shared cloud systems and resulting performance variability, (iii) availability of cloud services and systems, and (iv) the operational risk of running a production system in a cloud environment. Focusing on key metrics for each of these properties, we review the state-of-the-art, then select or propose new metrics together with measurement approaches. We see the presented metrics as a foundation toward upcoming, future industry-standard cloud benchmarks

In-Production Continuous Testing for Future Telco Cloud

Software Defined Networking (SDN) is an emerging paradigm to design, build and operate networks. The driving motivation of SDN was the need for a major change in network technologies to support a configuration, management, operation, reconfiguration and evolution than in current computer networks. In the SDN world, performance it is not only related to the behaviour of the data plane. As the separation of control plane and data plane makes the latter significantly more agile, it lays off all the complex processing workload to the control plane. This is further exacerbated in distributed network controller, where the control plane is additionally loaded with the state synchronization overhead. Furthermore, the introduction of SDNs technologies has raised advanced challenges in achieving failure resilience, meant as the persistence of service delivery that can justifiably be trusted, when facing changes, and fault tolerance, meant as the ability to avoid service failures in the presence of faults. Therefore, along with the “softwarization” of network services, it is an important goal in the engineering of such services, e.g. SDNs and NFVs, to be able to test and assess the proper functioning not only in emulated conditions before release and deployment, but also “in-production”, when the system is under real operating conditions.   The goal of this thesis is to devise an approach to evaluate not only the performance, but also the effectiveness of the failure detection, and mitigation mechanisms provided by SDN controllers, as well as the capability of the SDNs to ultimately satisfy nonfunctional requirements, especially resiliency, availability, and reliability. The approach consists of exploiting benchmarking techniques, such as the failure injection, to get continuously feedback on the performance as well as capabilities of the SDN services to survive failures, which is of paramount importance to improve the effective- ness of the system internal mechanisms in reacting to anomalous situations potentially occurring in operation, while its services are regularly updated or improved. Within this vision, this dissertation first presents SCP-CLUB (SDN Control Plane CLoUd-based Benchmarking), a benchmarking frame- work designed to automate the characterization of SDN control plane performance, resilience and fault tolerance in telco cloud deployments. The idea is to provide the same level of automation available in deploying NFV function, for the testing of different configuration, using idle cycles of the telco cloud infrastructure. Then, the dissertation proposes an extension of the framework with mechanisms to evaluate the runtime behaviour of a Telco Cloud SDN under (possibly unforeseen) failure conditions, by exploiting the software failure injection

A novel blockchain architecture based on network functions virtualization (NFV) with auto smart contracts

Network Function Virtualization (NFV) is considered to be a hopeful technology for supporting blockchain with many features like flexible networks and intelligent equipment. NFV decreases the expenses incurred on the maintenance and operation of assets that are generated through expenses, in addition to capital expenditures based on the isolate the physical devices from the main tasks executed by that equipment. Blockchain currency transfers or technology is the most powerful security tool that ensures the security of data. The prominent challenges in NFV are the processes of transition, vendor compatibility, network management, rapid growth, and security. The software industry and skills of networking are experiencing fast expansion and deployment of the Network Functions Virtualization (NFV) approach, jointly in blockchain and cloud networks. In this paper, a novel method is offered to virtualize the work of the blockchain based on the NFV with auto work of the smart contract between virtual nodes based on cloud computing. By blending NFV with Blockchain, all of the above-mentioned challenges have been overcome by moving to software environments through creating virtual nodes, as well as smooth interaction among them and managing the transactions between nodes and clients, indicating ideal network management. Through the proposed work, a throughput of up to 20% is obtained by applying NFV compared to not applying NFV to the blockchain. In addition, the costs of the hardware are eliminated and eventually a secure environment is used which distances the system from virtual attacks

Use of a virtualization in the transition of a telecommunication networks toward 5G

We are in the front of the next big step of a new generation of the telecommunications networks, called 5G. The 5G in still in the preparation, but the actual wide spread use is nearby. The move toward 5G is not possible without use of a cloud and a virtualization. In the paper we are dealing with the issues how to incorporate existing fixed networks to the mobile 5G network and how to use a virtualization technology when moving to 5G. From the example of a real telecommunication system we defined issues, dilemmas and suggestions when moving toward 5G networks using virtualization

From Resilience-Building to Resilience-Scaling Technologies: Directions -- ReSIST NoE Deliverable D13

This document is the second product of workpackage WP2, "Resilience-building and -scaling technologies", in the programme of jointly executed research (JER) of the ReSIST Network of Excellence. The problem that ReSIST addresses is achieving sufficient resilience in the immense systems of ever evolving networks of computers and mobile devices, tightly integrated with human organisations and other technology, that are increasingly becoming a critical part of the information infrastructure of our society. This second deliverable D13 provides a detailed list of research gaps identified by experts from the four working groups related to assessability, evolvability, usability and diversit

A Latency-driven Availability Assessment for Multi-Tenant Service Chains

Nowadays, most telecommunication services adhere to the Service Function Chain (SFC) paradigm, where network functions are implemented via software. In particular, container virtualization is becoming a popular approach to deploy network functions and to enable resource slicing among several tenants. The resulting infrastructure is a complex system composed by a huge amount of containers implementing different SFC functionalities, along with different tenants sharing the same chain. The complexity of such a scenario lead us to evaluate two critical metrics: the steady-state availability (the probability that a system is functioning in long runs) and the latency (the time between a service request and the pertinent response). Consequently, we propose a latency-driven availability assessment for multi-tenant service chains implemented via Containerized Network Functions (CNFs). We adopt a multi-state system to model single CNFs and the queueing formalism to characterize the service latency. To efficiently compute the availability, we develop a modified version of the Multidimensional Universal Generating Function (MUGF) technique. Finally, we solve an optimization problem to minimize the SFC cost under an availability constraint. As a relevant example of SFC, we consider a containerized version of IP Multimedia Subsystem, whose parameters have been estimated through fault injection techniques and load tests