An interoperable and self-adaptive approach for SLA-based service virtualization in heterogeneous Cloud environments

Cloud computing is a newly emerged computing infrastructure that builds on the latest achievements of diverse research areas, such as Grid computing, Service-oriented computing, business process management and virtualization. An important characteristic of Cloud-based services is the provision of non-functional guarantees in the form of Service Level Agreements (SLAs), such as guarantees on execution time or price. However, due to system malfunctions, changing workload conditions, hard- and software failures, established SLAs can be violated. In order to avoid costly SLA violations, flexible and adaptive SLA attainment strategies are needed. In this paper we present a self-manageable architecture for SLA-based service virtualization that provides a way to ease interoperable service executions in a diverse, heterogeneous, distributed and virtualized world of services. We demonstrate in this paper that the combination of negotiation, brokering and deployment using SLA-aware extensions and autonomic computing principles are required for achieving reliable and efficient service operation in distributed environments. © 2012 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved

An SLA-based resource virtualization approach for on-demand service provision

Cloud computing is a newly emerged research infrastructure that builds on the latest achievements of diverse research areas, such as Grid computing, Service-oriented computing, business processes and virtualization. In this paper we present an architecture for SLA-based resource virtualization that provides an extensive solution for executing user applications in Clouds. This work represents the first attempt to combine SLA-based resource negotiations with virtualized resources in terms of on-demand service provision resulting in a holistic virtualization approach. The architecture description focuses on three topics: agreement negotiation, service brokering and deployment using virtualization. The contribution is also demonstrated with a real-world case study

Autonomic SLA-Aware service virtualization for distributed systems

Cloud Computing builds on the latest achievements of diverse research areas, such as Grid Computing, Service-oriented computing, business processes and virtualization. Managing such heterogeneous environments requires sophisticated interoperation of adaptive coordinating components. In this paper we introduce an SLA-aware Service Virtualization architecture that provides non-functional guarantees in the form of Service Level Agreements and consists of a three-layered infrastructure including agreement negotiation, service brokering and on demand deployment. In order to avoid costly SLA violations, flexible and adaptive SLA attainment strategies are used with a failure propagation approach. We demonstrate the advantages of our proposed solution with a biochemical case study in a Cloud simulation environment. © 2011 IEEE

InterCloud: Utility-Oriented Federation of Cloud Computing Environments for Scaling of Application Services

Cloud computing providers have setup several data centers at different geographical locations over the Internet in order to optimally serve needs of their customers around the world. However, existing systems do not support mechanisms and policies for dynamically coordinating load distribution among different Cloud-based data centers in order to determine optimal location for hosting application services to achieve reasonable QoS levels. Further, the Cloud computing providers are unable to predict geographic distribution of users consuming their services, hence the load coordination must happen automatically, and distribution of services must change in response to changes in the load. To counter this problem, we advocate creation of federated Cloud computing environment (InterCloud) that facilitates just-in-time, opportunistic, and scalable provisioning of application services, consistently achieving QoS targets under variable workload, resource and network conditions. The overall goal is to create a computing environment that supports dynamic expansion or contraction of capabilities (VMs, services, storage, and database) for handling sudden variations in service demands. This paper presents vision, challenges, and architectural elements of InterCloud for utility-oriented federation of Cloud computing environments. The proposed InterCloud environment supports scaling of applications across multiple vendor clouds. We have validated our approach by conducting a set of rigorous performance evaluation study using the CloudSim toolkit. The results demonstrate that federated Cloud computing model has immense potential as it offers significant performance gains as regards to response time and cost saving under dynamic workload scenarios.Comment: 20 pages, 4 figures, 3 tables, conference pape

Enabling service-level agreement renegotiation through extending WS-Agreement specification

WS-Agreement is a language and protocol designed for creating service-level agreements (SLAs) based on initial offers, and for monitoring those offers at runtime. The definition of WS-Agreement protocol is very general and does not contemplate the possibility of changing an agreement at runtime. This paper presents extensions of the WS-Agreement specification to support the dynamic nature of SLAs by allowing the possibility of SLA renegotiation at runtime. The extended WS-Agreement specification has been implemented and tested. Within this implementation, the concept of renegotiation is demonstrated through the ability to create more than one SLA at runtime. An evaluation is conducted to examine the profits a service provider may gain through renegotiation, as well the savings resulting from rescuing the SLA from violations as a consequence of avoiding paying penalties. The results show that making the SLA terms adaptable and changeable is a viable mechanism that provides flexibility to the service provider and service consumer

Evaluation of SLA-based decision strategies for VM scheduling in cloud data centers

Copyright © 2016 held by owner/author(s). Service level agreements (SLAs) gain more and more importance in the area of cloud computing. An SLA is a contract between a customer and a cloud service provider (CSP) in which the CSP guarantees functional and non-functional quality of service parameters for cloud services. Since CSPs have to pay for the hardware used as well as penalties for violating SLAs, they are eager to fulfill these agreements while at the same time optimizing the utilization of their resources. In this paper we examine SLA-aware VM scheduling strategies for cloud data centers. The service level objectives considered are resource usage and availability. The sample resources are CPU and RAM. They can be overprovisioned by the CSPs which is the main leverage to increase their revenue. The availability of a VM is affected by migrating it within and between data centers. To get realistic results, we simulate the effect of the strategies using the FederatedCloudSim framework and real-world workload traces of business-critical VMs. Our evaluation shows that there are considerable differences between the scheduling strategies in terms of SLA violations and the number of migrations. From all strategies considered, the combination of the Minimization of Migrations strategy for VM selection and the Worst Fit strategy for host selection achieves the best results

Media Brokerage: Agent-Based SLA Negotiation

Media content personalisation is a major challenge involving viewers as well as media content producer and distributor businesses. The goal is to provide viewers with media items aligned with their interests. Producers and distributors engage in item negotiations to establish the corresponding service level agreements (SLA). In order to address automated partner lookup and item SLA negotiation, this paper proposes the MultiMedia Brokerage (MMB) platform, which is a multiagent system that negotiates SLA regarding media items on behalf of media content producer and distributor businesses. The MMB platform is structured in four service layers: interface, agreement management, business modelling and market. In this context, there are: (i) brokerage SLA (bSLA), which are established between individual businesses and the platform regarding the provision of brokerage services; and (ii) item SLA (iSLA), which are established between producer and distributor businesses about the provision of media items. In particular, this paper describes the negotiation, establishment and enforcement of bSLA and iSLA, which occurs at the agreement and negotiation layers, respectively. The platform adopts a pay-per-use business model where the bSLA define the general conditions that apply to the related iSLA. To illustrate this process, we present a case study describing the negotiation of a bSLA instance and several related iSLA instances. The latter correspond to the negotiation of the Electronic Program Guide (EPG) for a specific end viewer

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)

A Brokering Framework for Assessing Legal Risks in Big Data and the Cloud

“Cloud computing” and “Big Data” are amongst the most hyped-up terms and buzzwords of the moment. After decades in which individuals and companies used to host their data and applications using their own IT infrastructure, the world has seen the stunning transformation of the Internet. Major shifts occurred when these infrastructures began to be outsourced to public Cloud providers to match commercial expectations. Storing, sharing and transferring data and databases over the Internet is convenient, yet legal risks cannot be eliminated. Legal risk is a fast-growing area of research and covers various aspects of law. Current studies and research on Cloud computing legal risk assessment have been, however, limited in scope and focused mainly on security and privacy aspects. There is little systematic research on the risks, threats and impact of the legal issues inherent to database rights and “ownership” rights of data. Database rights seem to be outdated and there is a significant gap in the scientific literature when it comes to the understanding of how to apply its provisions in the Big Data era. This means that we need a whole new framework for understanding, protecting and sharing data in the Cloud. The scheme we propose in this chapter is based on a risk assessment-brokering framework that works side by side with Service Level Agreements (SLAs). This proposed framework will provide better control for Cloud users and will go a long way to increase confidence and reinforce trust in Cloud computing transactions

A generic scheduling architecture for service oriented distributed computing infrastructures

In state-of-the-art distributed computing infrastructures different kinds of resources are combined to offer complex services to customers. As of today, service-oriented middleware stacks are the work-horses to connect resources and their users, and to implement all functions needed to provide those services. Analysing the functionality of prominent middleware stacks, it becomes evident that common challenges, like scalability, manageability, efficiency, reliability, security, or complexity, exist, and that they constitute major research areas in information and communication technologies in general and distributed systems in particular. One core issue, touching all of the aforementioned challenges, is the question of how to distribute units of work in a distributed computing infrastructure, a task generally referred to as scheduling. Integrating a variety of resources and services while being compliant with well-defined business objectives makes the development of scheduling strategies and services a difficult venture, which, for service-oriented distributed computing infrastructures, translates to the assignment of services to activities over time aiming at the optimisation of multiple, potentially competing, quality-of-service criteria. Many concepts, methods, and tools for scheduling in distributed computing infrastructures exist, a majority of which being dedicated to provide algorithmic solutions and schedulers. We approach the problem from another angle and offer a more general answer to the question of ’how to design an automated scheduling process and an architecture supporting it’. Doing so, we take special care of the service-oriented nature of the systems we consider and of the integration of our solutions into IT service management processes. Our answer comprises a number of assets that form a comprehensive scheduling solution for distributed computing infrastructures. Based on a requirement analysis of application scenarios we provide a concept consisting of an automated scheduling process and the respective generic scheduling architecture supporting it. Process and architecture are based on four core models as there are a model to describe the activities to be executed, an information model to capture the capabilities of the infrastructure, a model to handle the life-cycle of service level agreements, which are the foundation for elaborated service management solutions, and a specific scheduling model capturing the specifics of state-of-the-art distributed systems. We deliver, in addition to concept and models, realisations of our solutions that demonstrate their applicability in different application scenarios spanning grid-like academic as well as financial service infrastructures. Last, but not least, we evaluate our scheduling model through simulations of artificial as well as realistic workload traces thus showing the feasibility of the approach and the implications of its usage. The work at hand therefore offers a blueprint for developers of scheduling solutions for state-of-the-art distributed computing infrastructures. It contributes essential building blocks to realise such solutions and provides an important step to integrate them into IT service management solutions