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

Clouds of Small Things: Provisioning Infrastructure-as-a-Service from within Community Networks

Community networks offer a shared communication infrastructure where communities of citizens build and own open networks. While the IP connectivity of the networking devices is successfully achieved, the number of services and applications available from within the community network is typically small and the usage of the community network is often limited to providing Internet access to remote areas through wireless links. In this paper we propose to apply the principle of resource sharing of community networks, currently limited to the network bandwidth, to other computing resources, which leads to cloud computing in community networks. Towards this vision, we review some characteristics of community networks and identify potential scenarios for community clouds. We simulate a cloud computing infrastructure service and discuss different aspects of its performance in comparison to a commercial centralized cloud system. We note that in community clouds the computing resources are heterogeneous and less powerful, which affects the time needed to assign resources. Response time of the infrastructure service is high in community clouds even for a small number of resources since resources are distributed, but tends to get closer to that of a centralized cloud when the number of resources requested increases. Our initial results suggest that the performance of the community clouds highly depends on the community network conditions, but has some potential for improvement with network-aware cloud services. The main strength compared to commercial cloud services, however, is that community cloud services hosted on community-owned resources will follow the principles of community network and will be neutral and open

Addressing the Challenges in Federating Edge Resources

This book chapter considers how Edge deployments can be brought to bear in a global context by federating them across multiple geographic regions to create a global Edge-based fabric that decentralizes data center computation. This is currently impractical, not only because of technical challenges, but is also shrouded by social, legal and geopolitical issues. In this chapter, we discuss two key challenges - networking and management in federating Edge deployments. Additionally, we consider resource and modeling challenges that will need to be addressed for a federated Edge.Comment: Book Chapter accepted to the Fog and Edge Computing: Principles and Paradigms; Editors Buyya, Sriram

CYCLONE Unified Deployment and Management of Federated, Multi-Cloud Applications

Various Cloud layers have to work in concert in order to manage and deploy complex multi-cloud applications, executing sophisticated workflows for Cloud resource deployment, activation, adjustment, interaction, and monitoring. While there are ample solutions for managing individual Cloud aspects (e.g. network controllers, deployment tools, and application security software), there are no well-integrated suites for managing an entire multi cloud environment with multiple providers and deployment models. This paper presents the CYCLONE architecture that integrates a number of existing solutions to create an open, unified, holistic Cloud management platform for multi-cloud applications, tailored to the needs of research organizations and SMEs. It discusses major challenges in providing a network and security infrastructure for the Intercloud and concludes with the demonstration how the architecture is implemented in a real life bioinformatics use case

BonFIRE: A multi-cloud test facility for internet of services experimentation

BonFIRE offers a Future Internet, multi-site, cloud testbed, targeted at the Internet of Services community, that supports large scale testing of applications, services and systems over multiple, geographically distributed, heterogeneous cloud testbeds. The aim of BonFIRE is to provide an infrastructure that gives experimenters the ability to control and monitor the execution of their experiments to a degree that is not found in traditional cloud facilities. The BonFIRE architecture has been designed to support key functionalities such as: resource management; monitoring of virtual and physical infrastructure metrics; elasticity; single document experiment descriptions; and scheduling. As for January 2012 BonFIRE release 2 is operational, supporting seven pilot experiments. Future releases will enhance the offering, including the interconnecting with networking facilities to provide access to routers, switches and bandwidth-on-demand systems. BonFIRE will be open for general use late 2012

funcX: A Federated Function Serving Fabric for Science

Exploding data volumes and velocities, new computational methods and platforms, and ubiquitous connectivity demand new approaches to computation in the sciences. These new approaches must enable computation to be mobile, so that, for example, it can occur near data, be triggered by events (e.g., arrival of new data), be offloaded to specialized accelerators, or run remotely where resources are available. They also require new design approaches in which monolithic applications can be decomposed into smaller components, that may in turn be executed separately and on the most suitable resources. To address these needs we present funcX---a distributed function as a service (FaaS) platform that enables flexible, scalable, and high performance remote function execution. funcX's endpoint software can transform existing clouds, clusters, and supercomputers into function serving systems, while funcX's cloud-hosted service provides transparent, secure, and reliable function execution across a federated ecosystem of endpoints. We motivate the need for funcX with several scientific case studies, present our prototype design and implementation, show optimizations that deliver throughput in excess of 1 million functions per second, and demonstrate, via experiments on two supercomputers, that funcX can scale to more than more than 130000 concurrent workers.Comment: Accepted to ACM Symposium on High-Performance Parallel and Distributed Computing (HPDC 2020). arXiv admin note: substantial text overlap with arXiv:1908.0490