HIL: designing an exokernel for the data center

We propose a new Exokernel-like layer to allow mutually untrusting physically deployed services to efficiently share the resources of a data center. We believe that such a layer offers not only efficiency gains, but may also enable new economic models, new applications, and new security-sensitive uses. A prototype (currently in active use) demonstrates that the proposed layer is viable, and can support a variety of existing provisioning tools and use cases.Partial support for this work was provided by the MassTech Collaborative Research Matching Grant Program, National Science Foundation awards 1347525 and 1149232 as well as the several commercial partners of the Massachusetts Open Cloud who may be found at http://www.massopencloud.or

Autonomic Cloud Computing: Open Challenges and Architectural Elements

As Clouds are complex, large-scale, and heterogeneous distributed systems, management of their resources is a challenging task. They need automated and integrated intelligent strategies for provisioning of resources to offer services that are secure, reliable, and cost-efficient. Hence, effective management of services becomes fundamental in software platforms that constitute the fabric of computing Clouds. In this direction, this paper identifies open issues in autonomic resource provisioning and presents innovative management techniques for supporting SaaS applications hosted on Clouds. We present a conceptual architecture and early results evidencing the benefits of autonomic management of Clouds.Comment: 8 pages, 6 figures, conference keynote pape

Sidecar based resource estimation method for virtualized environments

The widespread use of virtualization technologies in telecommunication system resulted in series of benefits, as flexibility, agility and increased resource usage efficiency. Nevertheless, the use of Virtualized Network Functions (VNF) in virtualized modules (e.g., containers, virtual machines) also means that some legacy mechanisms that are crucial for a telco grade operation are no longer efficient. Specifically, the monitoring of the resource sets (e.g., CPU power, memory capacity) allocated to VNFs cannot rely anymore on the methods developed for earlier deployment scenarios. Even the recent monitoring solutions designed for cloud environments is rendered useless if the VNF vendor and the telco solution supplier has to deploy its product into a virtualized environment, since it does not have access to the host level monitoring tools. In this paper we propose a sidecar-based solution to evaluate the resources available for a virtualized process. We evaluated the accuracy of our proposal in a proof of concept deployment, using KVM, Docker and Kubernetes virtualization technologies, respectively. We show that our proposal can provide real monitoring data and discuss its applicability