A survey on online monitoring approaches of computer-based systems

This report surveys forms of online data collection that are in current use (as well as being the subject of research to adapt them to changing technology and demands), and can be used as inputs to assessment of dependability and resilience, although they are not primarily meant for this use

An Industry-Based Study on the Efficiency Benefits of Utilising Public Cloud Infrastructure and Infrastructure as Code Tools in the IT Environment Creation Process

The traditional approaches to IT infrastructure management typically involve the procuring, housing and running of company-owned and maintained physical servers. In recent years, alternative solutions to IT infrastructure management based on public cloud technologies have emerged. Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS), also known as public cloud infrastructure, allows for the on-demand provisioning of IT infrastructure resources via the Internet. Cloud Service Providers (CSP) such as Amazon Web Services (AWS) offer integration of their cloud-based infrastructure with Infrastructure as Code (IaC) tools. These tools allow for the entire configuration of public cloud based infrastructure to be scripted out and defined as code. This thesis hypothesises that the correct utilization of IaaS and IaC can offer an organisation a more efficient type of IT infrastructure creation system than that of the organisations traditional method. To investigate this claim, an industry-based case study and survey questionnaire were carried out as part of this body of work. The case study involved the replacement of a manually managed IT infrastructure with that of the public cloud, the creation of which was automated via a framework consisting of IaC and related automation tools. The survey questionnaire was created with the intent to corroborate or refute the results obtained in the case study in the context of a wider audience of organisations. The results show that the correct utilization of IaaS and IaC technologies can provide greater efficiency in the management of IT networks than the traditional approac

Monitoring and Optimization of ATLAS Tier 2 Center GoeGrid

The demand on computational and storage resources is growing along with the amount of infor- mation that needs to be processed and preserved. In order to ease the provisioning of the digital services to the growing number of consumers, more and more distributed computing systems and platforms are actively developed and employed. The building block of the distributed computing infrastructure are single computing centers, similar to the Worldwide LHC Computing Grid, Tier 2 centre GoeGrid. The main motivation of this thesis was the optimization of GoeGrid perfor- mance by efficient monitoring. The goal has been achieved by means of the GoeGrid monitoring information analysis. The data analysis approach was based on the adaptive-network-based fuzzy inference system (ANFIS) and machine learning algorithm such as Linear Support Vector Machine (SVM). The main object of the research was the digital service, since availability, reliability and ser- viceability of the computing platform can be measured according to the constant and stable provisioning of the services. Due to the widely used concept of the service oriented architecture (SOA) for large computing facilities, in advance knowing of the service state as well as the quick and accurate detection of its disability allows to perform the proactive management of the com- puting facility. The proactive management is considered as a core component of the computing facility management automation concept, such as Autonomic Computing. Thus in time as well as in advance and accurate identification of the provided service status can be considered as a contribution to the computing facility management automation, which is directly related to the provisioning of the stable and reliable computing resources. Based on the case studies, performed using the GoeGrid monitoring data, consideration of the approaches as generalized methods for the accurate and fast identification and prediction of the service status is reasonable. Simplicity and low consumption of the computing resources allow to consider the methods in the scope of the Autonomic Computing component

Simplified cloud-oriented virtual machine management with MLN

System administrators are faced with the challenge of making their existing systems power-efficient and scalable. Although Cloud Computing is offered as a solution to this challenge by many, we argue that having multiple interfaces and cloud providers can result in more complexity than before. This paper addresses cloud computing from a user perspective. We show how complex scenarios, such as an on-demand render farm and scaling web-service, can be achieved utilizing clouds but at the same time keeping the same management interface as for local virtual machines. Further, we demonstrate that by enabling the virtual machine to have its policy locally instead of in the underlying framework, it can move between otherwise incompatible cloud providers and sites in order to achieve its goals more efficiently

Concepts for integrating DevOps methodologies with model-driven cloud management based on TOSCA

The paradigm of Cloud computing introduces new approaches to manage IT services and applications. Those approaches overcome traditional IT infrastructure and service management. One of the main goals of Cloud computing is to automate the whole management of IT services in order to reduce costs and to make the execution of management tasks less error-prone. To make this happen, Cloud providers offer proprietary tools to create and manage services in the Cloud. However, when services get more complex it is hard to manage them because those tools aim to be simple and thus provide limited functionality only. In addition, a particular service that was built based on a certain Cloud offering is bound to this offering including all its management aspects. Consequently, a service cannot be easily moved from one Cloud provider's infrastructure to another one's infrastructure. Today, tools and frameworks implementing so called "DevOps methodologies" can be used to realize management of Cloud services without binding a service to a particular Cloud provider. Nevertheless, complex services are still hard to manage by following those methodologies. To make such services manageable and enable automation of management tasks, a holistic service model is needed. Thus, model-driven Cloud management is an emerging paradigm to realize a holistic management approach for services in the Cloud. Because the DevOps approach and the model-driven approach are originating in different backgrounds, model-driven Cloud management does not cover some aspects of DevOps methodologies that are key for Cloud services. This thesis is focused on integrating DevOps methodologies with model-driven Cloud management. The goal is to combine the strengths of both approaches in order to minimize the shortcomings of the individual approaches

Configuration Management of Distributed Systems over Unreliable and Hostile Networks

Economic incentives of large criminal profits and the threat of legal consequences have pushed criminals to continuously improve their malware, especially command and control channels. This thesis applied concepts from successful malware command and control to explore the survivability and resilience of benign configuration management systems. This work expands on existing stage models of malware life cycle to contribute a new model for identifying malware concepts applicable to benign configuration management. The Hidden Master architecture is a contribution to master-agent network communication. In the Hidden Master architecture, communication between master and agent is asynchronous and can operate trough intermediate nodes. This protects the master secret key, which gives full control of all computers participating in configuration management. Multiple improvements to idempotent configuration were proposed, including the definition of the minimal base resource dependency model, simplified resource revalidation and the use of imperative general purpose language for defining idempotent configuration. Following the constructive research approach, the improvements to configuration management were designed into two prototypes. This allowed validation in laboratory testing, in two case studies and in expert interviews. In laboratory testing, the Hidden Master prototype was more resilient than leading configuration management tools in high load and low memory conditions, and against packet loss and corruption. Only the research prototype was adaptable to a network without stable topology due to the asynchronous nature of the Hidden Master architecture. The main case study used the research prototype in a complex environment to deploy a multi-room, authenticated audiovisual system for a client of an organization deploying the configuration. The case studies indicated that imperative general purpose language can be used for idempotent configuration in real life, for defining new configurations in unexpected situations using the base resources, and abstracting those using standard language features; and that such a system seems easy to learn. Potential business benefits were identified and evaluated using individual semistructured expert interviews. Respondents agreed that the models and the Hidden Master architecture could reduce costs and risks, improve developer productivity and allow faster time-to-market. Protection of master secret keys and the reduced need for incident response were seen as key drivers for improved security. Low-cost geographic scaling and leveraging file serving capabilities of commodity servers were seen to improve scaling and resiliency. Respondents identified jurisdictional legal limitations to encryption and requirements for cloud operator auditing as factors potentially limiting the full use of some concepts

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

Figure

This open access book shows how figures, figuring, and configuration are used to understand complex, contemporary problems. Figures are images, numbers, diagrams, data and datasets, turns-of-phrase, and representations. Contributors reflect on the history of figures as they have transformed disciplines and fields of study, and how methods of figuring and configuring have been integral to practices of description, computation, creation, criticism and political action. They do this by following figures across fields of social science, medicine, art, literature, media, politics, philosophy, history, anthropology, and science and technology studies. Readers will encounter figures as various as Je Suis Charlie, #MeToo, social media personae, gardeners, asthmatic children, systems configuration management and cloud computing – all demonstrate the methodological utility and contemporary relevance of thinking with figures. This book serves as a critical guide to a world of figures and a creative invitation to “go figure!

Figure

This open access book shows how figures, figuring, and configuration are used to understand complex, contemporary problems. Figures are images, numbers, diagrams, data and datasets, turns-of-phrase, and representations. Contributors reflect on the history of figures as they have transformed disciplines and fields of study, and how methods of figuring and configuring have been integral to practices of description, computation, creation, criticism and political action. They do this by following figures across fields of social science, medicine, art, literature, media, politics, philosophy, history, anthropology, and science and technology studies. Readers will encounter figures as various as Je Suis Charlie, #MeToo, social media personae, gardeners, asthmatic children, systems configuration management and cloud computing – all demonstrate the methodological utility and contemporary relevance of thinking with figures. This book serves as a critical guide to a world of figures and a creative invitation to “go figure!

Figure: Concept and Method

This open access book shows how figures, figuring, and configuration are used to understand complex, contemporary problems. Figures are images, numbers, diagrams, data and datasets, turns-of-phrase, and representations. Contributors reflect on the history of figures as they have transformed disciplines and fields of study, and how methods of figuring and configuring have been integral to practices of description, computation, creation, criticism and political action. They do this by following figures across fields of social science, medicine, art, literature, media, politics, philosophy, history, anthropology, and science and technology studies. Readers will encounter figures as various as Je Suis Charlie, #MeToo, social media personae, gardeners, asthmatic children, systems configuration management and cloud computing – all demonstrate the methodological utility and contemporary relevance of thinking with figures. This book serves as a critical guide to a world of figures and a creative invitation to “go figure!