Dependability of the NFV Orchestrator: State of the Art and Research Challenges

© 2018 IEEE. Personal use of this material is permitted. Permission from IEEE must be obtained for all other uses, in any current or future media, including reprinting/republishing this material for advertising or promotional purposes, creating new collective works, for resale or redistribution to servers or lists, or reuse of any copyrighted component of this work in other works.The introduction of network function virtualisation (NFV) represents a significant change in networking technology, which may create new opportunities in terms of cost efficiency, operations, and service provisioning. Although not explicitly stated as an objective, the dependability of the services provided using this technology should be at least as good as conventional solutions. Logical centralisation, off-the-shelf computing platforms, and increased system complexity represent new dependability challenges relative to the state of the art. The core function of the network, with respect to failure and service management, is orchestration. The failure and misoperation of the NFV orchestrator (NFVO) will have huge network-wide consequences. At the same time, NFVO is vulnerable to overload and design faults. Thus, the objective of this paper is to give a tutorial on the dependability challenges of the NFVO, and to give insight into the required future research. This paper provides necessary background information, reviews the available literature, outlines the proposed solutions, and identifies some design and research problems that must be addressed.acceptedVersio

MACHS: Mitigating the Achilles Heel of the Cloud through High Availability and Performance-aware Solutions

Cloud computing is continuously growing as a business model for hosting information and communication technology applications. However, many concerns arise regarding the quality of service (QoS) offered by the cloud. One major challenge is the high availability (HA) of cloud-based applications. The key to achieving availability requirements is to develop an approach that is immune to cloud failures while minimizing the service level agreement (SLA) violations. To this end, this thesis addresses the HA of cloud-based applications from different perspectives. First, the thesis proposes a component’s HA-ware scheduler (CHASE) to manage the deployments of carrier-grade cloud applications while maximizing their HA and satisfying the QoS requirements. Second, a Stochastic Petri Net (SPN) model is proposed to capture the stochastic characteristics of cloud services and quantify the expected availability offered by an application deployment. The SPN model is then associated with an extensible policy-driven cloud scoring system that integrates other cloud challenges (i.e. green and cost concerns) with HA objectives. The proposed HA-aware solutions are extended to include a live virtual machine migration model that provides a trade-off between the migration time and the downtime while maintaining HA objective. Furthermore, the thesis proposes a generic input template for cloud simulators, GITS, to facilitate the creation of cloud scenarios while ensuring reusability, simplicity, and portability. Finally, an availability-aware CloudSim extension, ACE, is proposed. ACE extends CloudSim simulator with failure injection, computational paths, repair, failover, load balancing, and other availability-based modules

Towards a Collection of Security and Privacy Patterns

Security and privacy (SP)-related challenges constitute a significant barrier to the wider adoption of Internet of Things (IoT)/Industrial IoT (IIoT) devices and the associated novel applications and services. In this context, patterns, which are constructs encoding re-usable solutions to common problems and building blocks to architectures, can be an asset in alleviating said barrier. More specifically, patterns can be used to encode dependencies between SP properties of individual smart objects and corresponding properties of orchestrations (compositions) involving them, facilitating the design of IoT solutions that are secure and privacy-aware by design. Motivated by the above, this work presents a survey and taxonomy of SP patterns towards the creation of a usable pattern collection. The aim is to enable decomposition of higher-level properties to more specific ones, matching them to relevant patterns, while also creating a comprehensive overview of security- and privacy-related properties and sub-properties that are of interest in IoT/IIoT environments. To this end, the identified patterns are organized using a hierarchical taxonomy that allows their classification based on provided property, context, and generality, while also showing the relationships between them. The two high-level properties, Security and Privacy, are decomposed to a first layer of lower-level sub-properties such as confidentiality and anonymity. The lower layers of the taxonomy, then, include implementation-level enablers. The coverage that these patterns offer in terms of the considered properties, data states (data in transit, at rest, and in process), and platform connectivity cases (within the same IoT platform and across different IoT platforms) is also highlighted. Furthermore, pointers to extensions of the pattern collection to include additional patterns and properties, including Dependability and Interoperability, are given. Finally, to showcase the use of the presented pattern collection, a practical application is detailed, involving the pattern-driven composition of IoT/IIoT orchestrations with SP property guarantees

Aligning a Service Provisioning Model of a Service-Oriented System with the ITIL v.3 Life Cycle

Bringing together the ICT and the business layer of a service-oriented system (SoS) remains a great challenge. Few papers tackle the management of SoS from the business and organizational point of view. One solution is to use the well-known ITIL v.3 framework. The latter enables to transform the organization into a service-oriented organizational which focuses on the value provided to the service customers. In this paper, we align the steps of the service provisioning model with the ITIL v.3 processes. The alignment proposed should help organizations and IT teams to integrate their ICT layer, represented by the SoS, and their business layer, represented by ITIL v.3. One main advantage of this combined use of ITIL and a SoS is the full service orientation of the company.Comment: This document is the technical work of a conference paper submitted to the International Conference on Exploring Service Science 1.5 (IESS 2015

A component-based framework for certification of components in a cloud of HPC services

HPC Shelfis a proposal of a cloud computing platform to provide component-oriented services for High Performance Computing (HPC) applications. This paper presents a Verification-as-a-Service (VaaS) framework for component certification onHPC Shelf. Certification is aimed at providing higher confidence that components of parallel computing systems ofHPC Shelfbehave as expected according to one or more requirements expressed in their contracts. To this end, new abstractions are introduced, starting with certifier components. They are designed to inspect other components and verify them for different types of functional, non-functional and behavioral requirements. The certification framework is naturally based on parallel computing techniques to speed up verification tasks.NORTE-01-0145- FEDER-000037

A UML Profile for the Design, Quality Assessment and Deployment of Data-intensive Applications

Big Data or Data-Intensive applications (DIAs) seek to mine, manipulate, extract or otherwise exploit the potential intelligence hidden behind Big Data. However, several practitioner surveys remark that DIAs potential is still untapped because of very difficult and costly design, quality assessment and continuous refinement. To address the above shortcoming, we propose the use of a UML domain-specific modeling language or profile specifically tailored to support the design, assessment and continuous deployment of DIAs. This article illustrates our DIA-specific profile and outlines its usage in the context of DIA performance engineering and deployment. For DIA performance engineering, we rely on the Apache Hadoop technology, while for DIA deployment, we leverage the TOSCA language. We conclude that the proposed profile offers a powerful language for data-intensive software and systems modeling, quality evaluation and automated deployment of DIAs on private or public clouds

VNET: Towards End-to-End Network Cloudification

International audienceTo address the needs for future network services, existing network architecture should evolve significantly to provide a higher level of flexibility, resilience and quality of service. This challenge was also the one of computing which has found with " virtualization " a breakthrough approach to bring a high flexibility in existing computing architecture which makes today the success of cloud computing. The next obvious following step is therefore to " cloudify " the networks. We introduce the VNET project, which proposes to study some of the most complex network cloudification problems from a global point of view i.e at radio access networks and the core networks to the service hosting data centers. It will identify the challenges and address the problems related to the visualization of RAN (Radio Access Networks), the problems of service composition and dependability related to the deployment of SDN and NFV, and finally the design a NaaS platform with the associated tools to allow the specification, validation, deployment and management of on-demand end-to-end services. In addition, the project will address the manageability of this " cloudified " architecture using autonomic concepts based on the MAPE framework

Dynamic managerial capabilities and competitive advantage : an empirical analysis of managers from the finance and insurance and real estate sectors

This thesis empirically investigated dynamic managerial capabilities (DMCs), which are the capacities that managers use to create, extend, and modify resources. The research objectives involved identifying, classifying, and assessing DMCs in generating competitive advantage using resource-based theory (RBT). The overall research aim was to build theory in a critical yet underdeveloped area of the literature. A multi-case study using a phenomenological approach was conducted with managers from five small-to-medium sized enterprises from the finance and insurance and real estate sectors. The managers were interviewed, and described episodes when they reconfigured resources during periods of rapid change (such as the recent financial crisis and recession) in order to compete. A survey questionnaire was also used in which respondents ranked DMCs, and discussed the joint uses of them, including which capabilities were used in developing and operating others. The results of the research showed that managers used specific transformational DMCs in periods of rapid change in order to generate advantage. The DMCs are learning-based (LBDMC) and innovation-based capabilities (IBDMC) and involve participative leadership (PL). They are mutually interdependent and reinforcing, impact on ordinary capabilities, and are evolutionarily fit. They exhibited commonalities, yet are considered idiosyncratic in detail. The results are relevant to the field of strategic management in terms of theory development and practical applicability. The academic contribution exploits a gap in the extant literature, and the research shows how DMCs can be developed, used, and maintained in practice