Cloud computing resource scheduling and a survey of its evolutionary approaches

A disruptive technology fundamentally transforming the way that computing services are delivered, cloud computing offers information and communication technology users a new dimension of convenience of resources, as services via the Internet. Because cloud provides a finite pool of virtualized on-demand resources, optimally scheduling them has become an essential and rewarding topic, where a trend of using Evolutionary Computation (EC) algorithms is emerging rapidly. Through analyzing the cloud computing architecture, this survey first presents taxonomy at two levels of scheduling cloud resources. It then paints a landscape of the scheduling problem and solutions. According to the taxonomy, a comprehensive survey of state-of-the-art approaches is presented systematically. Looking forward, challenges and potential future research directions are investigated and invited, including real-time scheduling, adaptive dynamic scheduling, large-scale scheduling, multiobjective scheduling, and distributed and parallel scheduling. At the dawn of Industry 4.0, cloud computing scheduling for cyber-physical integration with the presence of big data is also discussed. Research in this area is only in its infancy, but with the rapid fusion of information and data technology, more exciting and agenda-setting topics are likely to emerge on the horizon

Formulating and managing viable SLAs in cloud computing from a small to medium service provider's viewpoint: A state-of-the-art review

© 2017 Elsevier Ltd In today's competitive world, service providers need to be customer-focused and proactive in their marketing strategies to create consumer awareness of their services. Cloud computing provides an open and ubiquitous computing feature in which a large random number of consumers can interact with providers and request services. In such an environment, there is a need for intelligent and efficient methods that increase confidence in the successful achievement of business requirements. One such method is the Service Level Agreement (SLA), which is comprised of service objectives, business terms, service relations, obligations and the possible action to be taken in the case of SLA violation. Most of the emphasis in the literature has, until now, been on the formation of meaningful SLAs by service consumers, through which their requirements will be met. However, in an increasingly competitive market based on the cloud environment, service providers too need a framework that will form a viable SLA, predict possible SLA violations before they occur, and generate early warning alarms that flag a potential lack of resources. This is because when a provider and a consumer commit to an SLA, the service provider is bound to reserve the agreed amount of resources for the entire period of that agreement – whether the consumer uses them or not. It is therefore very important for cloud providers to accurately predict the likely resource usage for a particular consumer and to formulate an appropriate SLA before finalizing an agreement. This problem is more important for a small to medium cloud service provider which has limited resources that must be utilized in the best possible way to generate maximum revenue. A viable SLA in cloud computing is one that intelligently helps the service provider to determine the amount of resources to offer to a requesting consumer, and there are number of studies on SLA management in the literature. The aim of this paper is two-fold. First, it presents a comprehensive overview of existing state-of-the-art SLA management approaches in cloud computing, and their features and shortcomings in creating viable SLAs from the service provider's viewpoint. From a thorough analysis, we observe that the lack of a viable SLA management framework renders a service provider unable to make wise decisions in forming an SLA, which could lead to service violations and violation penalties. To fill this gap, our second contribution is the proposal of the Optimized Personalized Viable SLA (OPV-SLA) framework which assists a service provider to form a viable SLA and start managing SLA violation before an SLA is formed and executed. The framework also assists a service provider to make an optimal decision in service formation and allocate the appropriate amount of marginal resources. We demonstrate the applicability of our framework in forming viable SLAs through experiments. From the evaluative results, we observe that our framework helps a service provider to form viable SLAs and later to manage them to effectively minimize possible service violation and penalties

Automated Negotiation Among Web Services

Software as a service is well accepted software deployment and distribution model that is grown exponentially in the last few years. One of the biggest benefits of SaaS is the automated composition of these services in a composite system. It allows users to automatically find and bind these services, as to maximize the productivity of their composed systems, meeting both functional and non-functional requirements. In this paper we present a framework for modeling the dependency relationship of different Quality of Service parameters of a component service. Our proposed approach considers the different invocation patterns of component services in the system and models the dependency relationship for optimum values of these QoS parameters. We present a service composition framework that models the dependency relations ship among component services and uses the global QoS for service selection

Agent-based negotiation and decision making for dynamic supply chain formation

Modern businesses are facing the challenge of effectively coordinating their supply chains from upstream to downstream services. It is a complex problem to search, schedule, and coordinate a set of services from a large number of service resources under various constraints and uncertainties. Existing approaches to this problem have relied on complete information regarding service requirements and resources, without adequately addressing the dynamics and uncertainties of the environments. The real-world situations are complicated as a result of ambiguity in the requirements of the services, the uncertainty of solutions from service providers, and the interdependencies among the services to be composed. This paper investigates the complexity of supply chain formation and proposes an agent-mediated coordination approach. Each agent works as a broker for each service type, dedicated to selecting solutions for each service as well as interacting with other agents in refining the decision making to achieve compatibility among the solutions. The coordination among agents concerns decision making at strategic, tactical, and operational level. At the strategic level, agents communicate and negotiate for supply chain formation; at the tactical level, argumentation is used by agents to communicate and understand the preferences and constraints of each other; at the operational level, different strategies are used for selecting the preferences. Based on this approach, a prototype has been implemented with simulated experiments highlighting the effectiveness of the approach. © 2008 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.postprin

A framework for SLA-centric service-based Utility Computing

Nicht angegebenService oriented Utility Computing paves the way towards realization of service markets, which promise metered services through negotiable Service Level Agreements (SLA). A market does not necessarily imply a simple buyer-seller relationship, rather it is the culmination point of a complex chain of stake-holders with a hierarchical integration of value along each link in the chain. In service value chains, services corresponding to different partners are aggregated in a producer-consumer manner resulting in hierarchical structures of added value. SLAs are contracts between service providers and service consumers, which ensure the expected Quality of Service (QoS) to different stakeholders at various levels in this hierarchy. \emph{This thesis addresses the challenge of realizing SLA-centric infrastructure to enable service markets for Utility Computing.} Service Level Agreements play a pivotal role throughout the life cycle of service aggregation. The activities of service selection and service negotiation followed by the hierarchical aggregation and validation of services in service value chain, require SLA as an enabling technology. \emph{This research aims at a SLA-centric framework where the requirement-driven selection of services, flexible SLA negotiation, hierarchical SLA aggregation and validation, and related issues such as privacy, trust and security have been formalized and the prototypes of the service selection model and the validation model have been implemented. } The formal model for User-driven service selection utilizes Branch and Bound and Heuristic algorithms for its implementation. The formal model is then extended for SLA negotiation of configurable services of varying granularity in order to tweak the interests of the service consumers and service providers. %and then formalizing the requirements of an enabling infrastructure for aggregation and validation of SLAs existing at multiple levels and spanning % along the corresponding service value chains. The possibility of service aggregation opens new business opportunities in the evolving landscape of IT-based Service Economy. A SLA as a unit of business relationships helps establish innovative topologies for business networks. One example is the composition of computational services to construct services of bigger granularity thus giving room to business models based on service aggregation, Composite Service Provision and Reselling. This research introduces and formalizes the notions of SLA Choreography and hierarchical SLA aggregation in connection with the underlying service choreography to realize SLA-centric service value chains and business networks. The SLA Choreography and aggregation poses new challenges regarding its description, management, maintenance, validation, trust, privacy and security. The aggregation and validation models for SLA Choreography introduce concepts such as: SLA Views to protect the privacy of stakeholders; a hybrid trust model to foster business among unknown partners; and a PKI security mechanism coupled with rule based validation system to enable distributed queries across heterogeneous boundaries. A distributed rule based hierarchical SLA validation system is designed to demonstrate the practical significance of these notions

QoS Contract Negotiation in Distributed Component-Based Software

Currently, several mature and commercial component models (for e.g. EJB, .NET, COM+) exist on the market. These technologies were designed largely for applications with business-oriented non-functional requirements such as data persistence, confidentiality, and transactional support. They provide only limited support for the development of components and applications with non-functional properties (NFPs) like QoS (e.g. throughput, response time). The integration of QoS into component infrastructure requires among other things the support of components’ QoS contract specification, negotiation, adaptation, etc. This thesis focuses on contract negotiation. For applications in which the consideration of non-functional properties (NFPs) is essential (e.g. Video-on-Demand, eCommerce), a component-based solution demands the appropriate composition of the QoS contracts specified at the different ports of the collaborating components. The ports must be properly connected so that the QoS level required by one is matched by the QoS level provided by the other. Generally, QoS contracts of components depend on run-time resources (e.g. network bandwidth, CPU time) or quality attributes to be established dynamically and are usually specified in multiple QoS-Profiles. QoS contract negotiation enables the selection of appropriate concrete QoS contracts between collaborating components. In our approach, the component containers perform the contract negotiation at run-time. This thesis addresses the QoS contract negotiation problem by first modelling it as a constraint satisfaction optimization problem (CSOP). As a basis for this modelling, the provided and required QoS as well as resource demand are specified at the component level. The notion of utility is applied to select a good solution according to some negotiation goal (e.g. user’s satisfaction). We argue that performing QoS contract negotiation in multiple phases simplifies the negotiation process and makes it more efficient. Based on such classification, the thesis presents heuristic algorithms that comprise coarse-grained and fine-grained negotiations for collaborating components deployed in distributed nodes in the following scenarios: (i) single-client - single-server, (ii) multiple-clients, and (iii) multi-tier scenarios. To motivate the problem as well as to validate the proposed approach, we have examined three componentized distributed applications. These are: (i) video streaming, (ii) stock quote, and (iii) billing (to evaluate certain security properties). An experiment has been conducted to specify the QoS contracts of the collaborating components in one of the applications we studied. In a run-time system that implements our algorithm, we simulated different behaviors concerning: (i) user’s QoS requirements and preferences, (ii) resource availability conditions concerning the client, server, and network bandwidth, and (iii) the specified QoS-Profiles of the collaborating components. Under various conditions, the outcome of the negotiation confirms the claim we made with regard to obtaining a good solution

QoS Contract Negotiation in Distributed Component-Based Software

Currently, several mature and commercial component models (for e.g. EJB, .NET, COM+) exist on the market. These technologies were designed largely for applications with business-oriented non-functional requirements such as data persistence, confidentiality, and transactional support. They provide only limited support for the development of components and applications with non-functional properties (NFPs) like QoS (e.g. throughput, response time). The integration of QoS into component infrastructure requires among other things the support of components’ QoS contract specification, negotiation, adaptation, etc. This thesis focuses on contract negotiation. For applications in which the consideration of non-functional properties (NFPs) is essential (e.g. Video-on-Demand, eCommerce), a component-based solution demands the appropriate composition of the QoS contracts specified at the different ports of the collaborating components. The ports must be properly connected so that the QoS level required by one is matched by the QoS level provided by the other. Generally, QoS contracts of components depend on run-time resources (e.g. network bandwidth, CPU time) or quality attributes to be established dynamically and are usually specified in multiple QoS-Profiles. QoS contract negotiation enables the selection of appropriate concrete QoS contracts between collaborating components. In our approach, the component containers perform the contract negotiation at run-time. This thesis addresses the QoS contract negotiation problem by first modelling it as a constraint satisfaction optimization problem (CSOP). As a basis for this modelling, the provided and required QoS as well as resource demand are specified at the component level. The notion of utility is applied to select a good solution according to some negotiation goal (e.g. user’s satisfaction). We argue that performing QoS contract negotiation in multiple phases simplifies the negotiation process and makes it more efficient. Based on such classification, the thesis presents heuristic algorithms that comprise coarse-grained and fine-grained negotiations for collaborating components deployed in distributed nodes in the following scenarios: (i) single-client - single-server, (ii) multiple-clients, and (iii) multi-tier scenarios. To motivate the problem as well as to validate the proposed approach, we have examined three componentized distributed applications. These are: (i) video streaming, (ii) stock quote, and (iii) billing (to evaluate certain security properties). An experiment has been conducted to specify the QoS contracts of the collaborating components in one of the applications we studied. In a run-time system that implements our algorithm, we simulated different behaviors concerning: (i) user’s QoS requirements and preferences, (ii) resource availability conditions concerning the client, server, and network bandwidth, and (iii) the specified QoS-Profiles of the collaborating components. Under various conditions, the outcome of the negotiation confirms the claim we made with regard to obtaining a good solution

Intermediate Institutions for Interactive Learning Processes in a Governance Perspective: the Case of Aeronautic Industry in Campania Region.

The present paper presents the results of the empirical analysis on fifteen enterprises and twenty no-industrial organizations involved at different level in the Aeronautical Cluster in the Campania Region. Information and data on the selected sample are colleted both by a study of the industrial sector, and also by suitable questionnaires and interviews, that the authors have submitted to the entrepreneurs and to the top managers of either the enterprises or the no-industrial organizations. The authors have focalized their study by applying the SWOT analysis on the following issues: • the cluster’s structure by analysing the relational skill developed by single actors of the cluster and by their impact on the innovation capacity of the enterprises; • the effectiveness of cluster’s governance strategies and how different actors actually participate to the local development processes of the aeronautical industrial sector. On these bases the authors wanted to deduce possible policy options for different kind of actors to optimize the cluster’s governance. Particularly they will describe in the present paper some indications to: 1) the SME’s that present strong relations with customers but low integration with large part of the others actors, i.e. with no-customers enterprises; 2) the large enterprises related to the industrial policies and to the suppliers' governance; 3) the policy makers at local level and the intermediate institutions for a better support of the local enterprises. In fact, the research results are based on the conscientious awareness that the analyzed sector is at a critical point, for which it is necessary that all the actors involved put together their efforts in order to steer and to direct the development process, both by identifying participative mechanisms at local level and also by strengthening those exogenous elements which are able to promote local development. Obviously only part of the criticisms can be solved at local and national level and some of them can be solved only partially. This observation opens the question of policy at the international level which can be determinate only with a more exhaustive integration into transnational networks. The research described in the present paper has been undertaken within the framework of the project: “IKINET – International Knowledge and Innovation Network†(EU FP6, N° CIT2-CT-2004-506242).