Predictive Analysis for Cloud Infrastructure Metrics

In a cloud computing environment, enterprises have the flexibility to request resources according to their application demands. This elastic feature of cloud computing makes it an attractive option for enterprises to host their applications on the cloud. Cloud providers usually exploit this elasticity by auto-scaling the application resources for quality assurance. However, there is a setup-time delay that may take minutes between the demand for a new resource and it being prepared for utilization. This causes the static resource provisioning techniques, which request allocation of a new resource only when the application breaches a specific threshold, to be slow and inefficient for the resource allocation task. To overcome this limitation, it is important to foresee the upcoming resource demand for an application before it becomes overloaded and trigger resource allocation in advance to allow setup time for the newly allocated resource. Machine learning techniques like time-series forecasting can be leveraged to provide promising results for dynamic resource allocation. In this research project, I developed a predictive analysis model for dynamic resource provisioning for cloud infrastructure. The researched solution demonstrates that it can predict the upcoming workload for various cloud infrastructure metrics upto 4 hours in future to allow allocation of virtual machines in advance

Elastic Business Process Management: State of the Art and Open Challenges for BPM in the Cloud

With the advent of cloud computing, organizations are nowadays able to react rapidly to changing demands for computational resources. Not only individual applications can be hosted on virtual cloud infrastructures, but also complete business processes. This allows the realization of so-called elastic processes, i.e., processes which are carried out using elastic cloud resources. Despite the manifold benefits of elastic processes, there is still a lack of solutions supporting them. In this paper, we identify the state of the art of elastic Business Process Management with a focus on infrastructural challenges. We conceptualize an architecture for an elastic Business Process Management System and discuss existing work on scheduling, resource allocation, monitoring, decentralized coordination, and state management for elastic processes. Furthermore, we present two representative elastic Business Process Management Systems which are intended to counter these challenges. Based on our findings, we identify open issues and outline possible research directions for the realization of elastic processes and elastic Business Process Management.Comment: Please cite as: S. Schulte, C. Janiesch, S. Venugopal, I. Weber, and P. Hoenisch (2015). Elastic Business Process Management: State of the Art and Open Challenges for BPM in the Cloud. Future Generation Computer Systems, Volume NN, Number N, NN-NN., http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.future.2014.09.00

Effectiveness of segment routing technology in reducing the bandwidth and cloud resources provisioning times in network function virtualization architectures

Network Function Virtualization is a new technology allowing for a elastic cloud and bandwidth resource allocation. The technology requires an orchestrator whose role is the service and resource orchestration. It receives service requests, each one characterized by a Service Function Chain, which is a set of service functions to be executed according to a given order. It implements an algorithm for deciding where both to allocate the cloud and bandwidth resources and to route the SFCs. In a traditional orchestration algorithm, the orchestrator has a detailed knowledge of the cloud and network infrastructures and that can lead to high computational complexity of the SFC Routing and Cloud and Bandwidth resource Allocation (SRCBA) algorithm. In this paper, we propose and evaluate the effectiveness of a scalable orchestration architecture inherited by the one proposed within the European Telecommunications Standards Institute (ETSI) and based on the functional separation of an NFV orchestrator in Resource Orchestrator (RO) and Network Service Orchestrator (NSO). Each cloud domain is equipped with an RO whose task is to provide a simple and abstract representation of the cloud infrastructure. These representations are notified of the NSO that can apply a simplified and less complex SRCBA algorithm. In addition, we show how the segment routing technology can help to simplify the SFC routing by means of an effective addressing of the service functions. The scalable orchestration solution has been investigated and compared to the one of a traditional orchestrator in some network scenarios and varying the number of cloud domains. We have verified that the execution time of the SRCBA algorithm can be drastically reduced without degrading the performance in terms of cloud and bandwidth resource costs

Cloudbus Toolkit for Market-Oriented Cloud Computing

This keynote paper: (1) presents the 21st century vision of computing and identifies various IT paradigms promising to deliver computing as a utility; (2) defines the architecture for creating market-oriented Clouds and computing atmosphere by leveraging technologies such as virtual machines; (3) provides thoughts on market-based resource management strategies that encompass both customer-driven service management and computational risk management to sustain SLA-oriented resource allocation; (4) presents the work carried out as part of our new Cloud Computing initiative, called Cloudbus: (i) Aneka, a Platform as a Service software system containing SDK (Software Development Kit) for construction of Cloud applications and deployment on private or public Clouds, in addition to supporting market-oriented resource management; (ii) internetworking of Clouds for dynamic creation of federated computing environments for scaling of elastic applications; (iii) creation of 3rd party Cloud brokering services for building content delivery networks and e-Science applications and their deployment on capabilities of IaaS providers such as Amazon along with Grid mashups; (iv) CloudSim supporting modelling and simulation of Clouds for performance studies; (v) Energy Efficient Resource Allocation Mechanisms and Techniques for creation and management of Green Clouds; and (vi) pathways for future research.Comment: 21 pages, 6 figures, 2 tables, Conference pape

Resource Management for Elastic Publish Subscribe Systems: A Performance Modeling-based Approach (Extended Version)

As more and more information systems are moving to the cloud, there have been efforts to deploy publish-subscribe (or pub/sub) systems in the cloud environment to take advantage of the elasticity of resources. As a result, there is a need to perform resource management for the cloud-based pub/sub systems that supports various types of jobs, each consists of a series of tasks, or workflow. Designing an efficient and effective resource management approach for the cloud-based pub/sub system is challenging because such an approach needs to be able to support flexible provisioning strategies, model the complex interactions between heterogeneous types of jobs, and provide dynamic resource allocation capability. In this paper, we formulate the resource management problem of elastic pub/sub system as optimization problems using different objectives functions. We model the elastic pub/sub system as a multiple-class open queuing network to derive system performance measures, and propose greedy algorithms to efficiently solve the optimization problems. Our evaluation based on simulation on real system show that our proposed solution outperforms the baseline and is robust in dealing with high-volume and fast-changing workload.Ope

Cloud Asset Pricing Tree (CAPT) Elastic Economic Model for Cloud Service Providers

Cloud providers are incorporating novel techniques to cope with prospective aspects of trading like resource allocation over future demands and its pricing elasticity that was not foreseen before. To leverage the pricing elasticity of upcoming demand and supply, we employ financial option theory (future contracts) as a mechanism to alleviate the risk in resource allocation over future demands. This study introduces a novel Cloud Asset Pricing Tree (CAPT) model that finds the optimal premium price of the Cloud federation options efficiently. Providers will benefit by this model to make decisions when to buy options in advance and when to exercise them to achieve more economies of scale. The CAPT model adapts its structure to address the price elasticity concerns and makes the demand, price inelastic and the supply, price elastic. Our empirical evidences suggest that using the CAPT model, exploits the Cloud market potential as an opportunity for more resource utilization and future capacity planning.