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

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

Managing polyglot systems metadata with hypergraphs

A single type of data store can hardly fulfill every end-user requirements in the NoSQL world. Therefore, polyglot systems use different types of NoSQL datastores in combination. However, the heterogeneity of the data storage models makes managing the metadata a complex task in such systems, with only a handful of research carried out to address this. In this paper, we propose a hypergraph-based approach for representing the catalog of metadata in a polyglot system. Taking an existing common programming interface to NoSQL systems, we extend and formalize it as hypergraphs for managing metadata. Then, we define design constraints and query transformation rules for three representative data store types. Furthermore, we propose a simple query rewriting algorithm using the catalog itself for these data store types and provide a prototype implementation. Finally, we show the feasibility of our approach on a use case of an existing polyglot system.Peer ReviewedPostprint (author's final draft

Updating collection representations for federated search

To facilitate the search for relevant information across a set of online distributed collections, a federated information retrieval system typically represents each collection, centrally, by a set of vocabularies or sampled documents. Accurate retrieval is therefore related to how precise each representation reflects the underlying content stored in that collection. As collections evolve over time, collection representations should also be updated to reflect any change, however, a current solution has not yet been proposed. In this study we examine both the implications of out-of-date representation sets on retrieval accuracy, as well as proposing three different policies for managing necessary updates. Each policy is evaluated on a testbed of forty-four dynamic collections over an eight-week period. Our findings show that out-of-date representations significantly degrade performance overtime, however, adopting a suitable update policy can minimise this problem

A Taxonomy of Data Grids for Distributed Data Sharing, Management and Processing

Data Grids have been adopted as the platform for scientific communities that need to share, access, transport, process and manage large data collections distributed worldwide. They combine high-end computing technologies with high-performance networking and wide-area storage management techniques. In this paper, we discuss the key concepts behind Data Grids and compare them with other data sharing and distribution paradigms such as content delivery networks, peer-to-peer networks and distributed databases. We then provide comprehensive taxonomies that cover various aspects of architecture, data transportation, data replication and resource allocation and scheduling. Finally, we map the proposed taxonomy to various Data Grid systems not only to validate the taxonomy but also to identify areas for future exploration. Through this taxonomy, we aim to categorise existing systems to better understand their goals and their methodology. This would help evaluate their applicability for solving similar problems. This taxonomy also provides a "gap analysis" of this area through which researchers can potentially identify new issues for investigation. Finally, we hope that the proposed taxonomy and mapping also helps to provide an easy way for new practitioners to understand this complex area of research.Comment: 46 pages, 16 figures, Technical Repor