SLA-Oriented Resource Provisioning for Cloud Computing: Challenges, Architecture, and Solutions

Cloud computing systems promise to offer subscription-oriented, enterprise-quality computing services to users worldwide. With the increased demand for delivering services to a large number of users, they need to offer differentiated services to users and meet their quality expectations. Existing resource management systems in data centers are yet to support Service Level Agreement (SLA)-oriented resource allocation, and thus need to be enhanced to realize cloud computing and utility computing. In addition, no work has been done to collectively incorporate customer-driven service management, computational risk management, and autonomic resource management into a market-based resource management system to target the rapidly changing enterprise requirements of Cloud computing. This paper presents vision, challenges, and architectural elements of SLA-oriented resource management. The proposed architecture supports integration of marketbased provisioning policies and virtualisation technologies for flexible allocation of resources to applications. The performance results obtained from our working prototype system shows the feasibility and effectiveness of SLA-based resource provisioning in Clouds.Comment: 10 pages, 7 figures, Conference Keynote Paper: 2011 IEEE International Conference on Cloud and Service Computing (CSC 2011, IEEE Press, USA), Hong Kong, China, December 12-14, 201

A Reliable and Cost-Efficient Auto-Scaling System for Web Applications Using Heterogeneous Spot Instances

Cloud providers sell their idle capacity on markets through an auction-like mechanism to increase their return on investment. The instances sold in this way are called spot instances. In spite that spot instances are usually 90% cheaper than on-demand instances, they can be terminated by provider when their bidding prices are lower than market prices. Thus, they are largely used to provision fault-tolerant applications only. In this paper, we explore how to utilize spot instances to provision web applications, which are usually considered availability-critical. The idea is to take advantage of differences in price among various types of spot instances to reach both high availability and significant cost saving. We first propose a fault-tolerant model for web applications provisioned by spot instances. Based on that, we devise novel auto-scaling polices for hourly billed cloud markets. We implemented the proposed model and policies both on a simulation testbed for repeatable validation and Amazon EC2. The experiments on the simulation testbed and the real platform against the benchmarks show that the proposed approach can greatly reduce resource cost and still achieve satisfactory Quality of Service (QoS) in terms of response time and availability

Performance-oriented Cloud Provisioning: Taxonomy and Survey

Cloud computing is being viewed as the technology of today and the future. Through this paradigm, the customers gain access to shared computing resources located in remote data centers that are hosted by cloud providers (CP). This technology allows for provisioning of various resources such as virtual machines (VM), physical machines, processors, memory, network, storage and software as per the needs of customers. Application providers (AP), who are customers of the CP, deploy applications on the cloud infrastructure and then these applications are used by the end-users. To meet the fluctuating application workload demands, dynamic provisioning is essential and this article provides a detailed literature survey of dynamic provisioning within cloud systems with focus on application performance. The well-known types of provisioning and the associated problems are clearly and pictorially explained and the provisioning terminology is clarified. A very detailed and general cloud provisioning classification is presented, which views provisioning from different perspectives, aiding in understanding the process inside-out. Cloud dynamic provisioning is explained by considering resources, stakeholders, techniques, technologies, algorithms, problems, goals and more.Comment: 14 pages, 3 figures, 3 table

An Autonomous Engine for Services Configuration and Deployment.

The runtime management of the infrastructure providing service-based systems is a complex task, up to the point where manual operation struggles to be cost effective. As the functionality is provided by a set of dynamically composed distributed services, in order to achieve a management objective multiple operations have to be applied over the distributed elements of the managed infrastructure. Moreover, the manager must cope with the highly heterogeneous characteristics and management interfaces of the runtime resources. With this in mind, this paper proposes to support the configuration and deployment of services with an automated closed control loop. The automation is enabled by the definition of a generic information model, which captures all the information relevant to the management of the services with the same abstractions, describing the runtime elements, service dependencies, and business objectives. On top of that, a technique based on satisfiability is described which automatically diagnoses the state of the managed environment and obtains the required changes for correcting it (e.g., installation, service binding, update, or configuration). The results from a set of case studies extracted from the banking domain are provided to validate the feasibility of this propos

Achieving Adaptation Through Live Virtual Machine Migration in Two-Tier Clouds

This thesis presents a model-driven approach for application deployment and management in two-tier heterogeneous cloud environments. For application deployment, we introduce the architecture, the services and the domain specific language that abstract common features of multi-cloud deployments. By leveraging the architecture and the language, application deployers author a deployment model that captures the high-level structure of the application. The deployment model is then translated into deployment workflows on specific clouds. As a use case, we introduce a live VM migration framework that maintains the application quality of services through VM migrations across two tier-clouds. The proposed framework can monitor the performance of the applications and their underlying infrastructure and plan and executes VM migrations to eliminate hotspots in a datacenter. We evaluate both the application deployment architecture and the live migration on public clouds

Conceptualizing a framework for cyber-physical systems of systems development and deployment

ABSTRACT Cyber-physical systems (CPS) refer to the next generation of embedded ICT systems that are interconnected, collaborative and that provide users and businesses with a wide range of smart applications and services. Software in CPS applications ranges from small systems to large systems, aka. Systems of Systems (SoS), such as smart grids and cities. CPSoS require managing massive amounts of data, being aware of their emerging behavior, and scaling out to progressively evolve and add new systems. Cloud computing supports processing and storing massive amounts of data, hosting and delivering services, and configuring selfprovisioned resources. Therefore, cloud computing is the natural candidate to solve CPSoS needs. However, the diversity of platforms and the low-level cloud programming models make difficult to find a common solution for the development and deployment of CPSoS. This paper presents the architectural foundations of a cloud-centric framework for automating the development and deployment of CPSoS service applications to converge towards a common open service platform for CPSoS applications. This framework relies on the well-known qualities of the microservices architecture style, the autonomic computing paradigm, and the model-driven software development approach. Its implementation and validation is on-going at two European and national projects