Towards a unified management of applications on heterogeneous clouds

J. Carrasco, F. Durán y E. Pimentel. "Towards a Unified Management of Applications on Heterogeneous Clouds". Proceedings of the PhD Symposium at the 5th European Conference on Service-Oriented and Cloud Computing. G. Zavattaro and W. Zimmermann (eds). University Halle-Wittenberg. Technical Report 2016/02, 40-47. 2016.The diversity in the way cloud providers o↵er their services, give their SLAs, present their QoS, or support di↵erent technologies, makes very difficult the portability and interoperability of cloud applications, and favours the well-known vendor lock-in problem. We propose a model to describe cloud applications and the required resources in an agnostic, and providers- and resources-independent way, in which individual application modules, and entire applications, may be re-deployed using different services without modification. To support this model, and after the proposal of a variety of cross-cloud application management tools by different authors, we propose going one step further in the unification of cloud services with a management approach in which IaaS and PaaS services are integrated into a unified interface. We provide support for deploying applications whose components are distributed on different cloud providers, indistinctly using IaaS and PaaS services.Universidad de Málaga. Campus de Excelencia Internacional Andalucía Tech

PaaS manager : a platform-as-a-service aggregation framework

The advent of Cloud Computing opened new opportunities in several areas, namely in the application development processes. As consequence, nowadays, PaaS (Platform-as-a-Service) service model allows simpler and flexible deployment strategies of applications, avoiding the need for dedicated networks, servers, stor- age, and other services. Within this context, several PaaS providers exist in the market, but each one having specific characteristics, proprietary technologies and Application Programming Interfaces (APIs). Based on such assumptions, this work addresses the challenge of devising a PaaS aggregation solution with the objective of unifying the information and management processes of applications created in PaaS environments. The proposed solution, denominated as PaaS Manager, take the form of a PaaS API aggregator aiming to struggle the existing lock-in in the PaaS market. In this perspective, this paper describes the specification, development and test of the proposed PaaS Manager solution. As result of this framework, end-users are able to select the most appropriate PaaS platform for an application, interacting with any supported vendor through a unique deployment and management interface.This work has been supported by FCT - Fundação para a Ciência e a Tecnologia within the Project Scope: PEst-OE/EEI/UI0319/2014

Mobile Cloud Support for Semantic-Enriched Speech Recognition in Social Care

Nowadays, most users carry high computing power mobile devices where speech recognition is certainly one of the main technologies available in every modern smartphone, although battery draining and application performance (resource shortage) have a big impact on the experienced quality. Shifting applications and services to the cloud may help to improve mobile user satisfaction as demonstrated by several ongoing efforts in the mobile cloud area. However, the quality of speech recognition is still not sufficient in many complex cases to replace the common hand written text, especially when prompt reaction to short-term provisioning requests is required. To address the new scenario, this paper proposes a mobile cloud infrastructure to support the extraction of semantics information from speech recognition in the Social Care domain, where carers have to speak about their patients conditions in order to have reliable notes used afterward to plan the best support. We present not only an architecture proposal, but also a real prototype that we have deployed and thoroughly assessed with different queries, accents, and in presence of load peaks, in our experimental mobile cloud Platform as a Service (PaaS) testbed based on Cloud Foundry

A comparison framework and review of service brokerage solutions for cloud architectures

Cloud service brokerage has been identified as a key concern for future cloud technology development and research. We compare service brokerage solutions. A range of specific concerns like architecture, programming and quality will be looked at. We apply a 2-pronged classification and comparison framework.We will identify challenges and wider research objectives based on an identification of cloud broker architecture concerns and technical requirements for service brokerage solutions. We will discuss complex cloud architecture concerns such as commoditisation and federation of integrated, vertical cloud stacks

Identity management in cloud platforms using VOMS and SPID

Cloud computing is being adopted more and more in recent years. It offers several benefits, such as high elasticity, availability and cost reduction, but yet presents some issues. Among the most important, the potential lack of security can affect the spreading of this technology. As cloud computing is pushing forward to the digital era, where users can have their own digital identity to access restricted resources or services, a reliable authentication and authorization system would attract more users to get involved in such process. This paper proposes an integration of the VOMS (Virtual Organization Membership Service) system for authorization and SPID (Sistema Pubblico per la gestione dell'Identità Digitale) system for authentication, within Cloud Foundry PaaS (Platform as a Service) model. Considerations, differences and interoperability matters will be addressed in order to provide a comprehensive scheme