Hybrid Cloud Workload Monitoring as a Service

Cloud computing and cloud-based hosting has become embedded in our daily lives. It is imperative for cloud providers to make sure all services used by both enterprises and consumers have high availability and elasticity to prevent any downtime, which impacts negatively for any business. To ensure cloud infrastructures are working reliably, cloud monitoring becomes an essential need for both businesses, the provider and the consumer. This thesis project reports on the need of efficient scalable monitoring, enumerating the necessary types of metrics of interest to be collected. Current understanding of various architectures designed to collect, store and process monitoring data to provide useful insight is surveyed. The pros and cons of each architecture and when such architecture should be used, based on deployment style and strategy, is also reported in the survey. Finally, the essential characteristics of a cloud monitoring system, primarily the features they host to operationalize an efficient monitoring framework, are provided as part of this review. While its apparent that embedded and decentralized architectures are the current favorite in the industry, service-oriented architectures are gaining traction. This project aims to build a light-weight, scalable, embedded monitoring tool which collects metrics at different layers of the cloud stack and aims at achieving correlation in resource-consumption between layers. Future research can be conducted on efficient machine learning models used on the monitoring data to predict resource usage spikes pre-emptively

On the Fly Orchestration of Unikernels: Tuning and Performance Evaluation of Virtual Infrastructure Managers

Network operators are facing significant challenges meeting the demand for more bandwidth, agile infrastructures, innovative services, while keeping costs low. Network Functions Virtualization (NFV) and Cloud Computing are emerging as key trends of 5G network architectures, providing flexibility, fast instantiation times, support of Commercial Off The Shelf hardware and significant cost savings. NFV leverages Cloud Computing principles to move the data-plane network functions from expensive, closed and proprietary hardware to the so-called Virtual Network Functions (VNFs). In this paper we deal with the management of virtual computing resources (Unikernels) for the execution of VNFs. This functionality is performed by the Virtual Infrastructure Manager (VIM) in the NFV MANagement and Orchestration (MANO) reference architecture. We discuss the instantiation process of virtual resources and propose a generic reference model, starting from the analysis of three open source VIMs, namely OpenStack, Nomad and OpenVIM. We improve the aforementioned VIMs introducing the support for special-purpose Unikernels and aiming at reducing the duration of the instantiation process. We evaluate some performance aspects of the VIMs, considering both stock and tuned versions. The VIM extensions and performance evaluation tools are available under a liberal open source licence

State of runtime adaptation in service-oriented systems:what, where, when, how and right

Software as a Service reflects a ‘service-oriented’ approach to software development that is based on the notion of composing applications by discovering and invoking network-available services to accomplish some task. However, as more business organisations adopt service-oriented solutions and the demands on them grow, the problem of ensuring that the software systems can adapt fast and effectively to changing business needs, changes in their runtime environment and failures in provided services has become an increasingly important research problem. Dynamic adaptation has been proposed as a way to address the problem. However, for adaptation to be effective several other factors need to be considered. This study identifies the key factors that influence runtime adaptation in service-oriented systems (SOSs) and examines how well they are addressed in 29 adaptation approaches intended to support SOSs

Dynamic Capabilities in Information Systems Research: A Critical Review, Synthesis of Current Knowledge, and Recommendations for Future Research

Over the past twenty years, the dynamic capabilities view (DCV) has gained prominence in the IS field as a theoretical perspective from which to explain competitive advantage in turbulent environments. While there are quite a few review studies of dynamic capabilities (DCs) in the strategic management domain, research on DCs in the IS area has not been synthesized nor critically analyzed. The result is that the role that IT plays in the DCV remains largely ambiguous, and the way we think and conduct IS research on DCs is unquestioned. Addressing this, we conducted a critical review of DCs in IS research based on 136 papers. Our review provides a synthesis of contemporary knowledge on DCs that emphasizes the role of IT in this research, and a critical analysis of the assumptions underlying this literature. In addition, we develop a minimum DC definition for future research as a solution to the conceptual issues that we uncovered via the critical analysis. We further leverage the remaining findings of our critical review by providing a detailed research agenda for future investigations on DCs by IS scholars