Live migration on ARM-based micro-datacentres

Live migration, underpinned by virtualisation technologies, has enabled improved manageability and fault tolerance for servers. However, virtualised server infrastructures suffer from significant processing overheads, system inconsistencies, security issues and unpredictable performance which makes them unsuitable for low-power and resource-constraint computing devices that processing latency-sensitive, 'Big-data'-type data. Consequently, we ask: 'How do we eliminate the overhead of virtualisation whilst still retaining its benefits?' Motivated by this question, we investigate a practical approach for a bare-metal live migration scheme for ARM-based instances low-power servers and edge devices. In this paper, we position ARM-based bare-metal live migration as a technique that will underpin the efficiency on edge-computing and on Micro-datacentres. We also introduce our early work on identifying three key technical challenges and discuss their solutions

Topics in Power Usage in Network Services

The rapid advance of computing technology has created a world powered by millions of computers. Often these computers are idly consuming energy unnecessarily in spite of all the efforts of hardware manufacturers. This thesis examines proposals to determine when to power down computers without negatively impacting on the service they are used to deliver, compares and contrasts the efficiency of virtualisation with containerisation, and investigates the energy efficiency of the popular cryptocurrency Bitcoin. We begin by examining the current corpus of literature and defining the key terms we need to proceed. Then we propose a technique for improving the energy consumption of servers by moving them into a sleep state and employing a low powered device to act as a proxy in its place. After this we move on to investigate the energy efficiency of virtualisation and compare the energy efficiency of two of the most common means used to do this. Moving on from this we look at the cryptocurrency Bitcoin. We consider the energy consumption of bitcoin mining and if this compared with the value of bitcoin makes this profitable. Finally we conclude by summarising the results and findings of this thesis. This work increases our understanding of some of the challenges of energy efficient computation as well as proposing novel mechanisms to save energy

Experimental evaluation of a CPU Live Migration on ARM based Bare metal Instances

The advent of 5G and the adoption of digitalization in all areas of industry has resulted in the exponential growth of the Internet of Things (IoTs) devices, increasing the flow of data that travels back and forth to a centralized Cloud data centre for storage, processing, and analysis. This in turn puts pressure on the intermediate edge and core network infrastructure as traditional Cloud Computing is not ready to support this massive amount and diversity of devices and data. This need for faster processing, low latency and higher network consistency makes a case for Edge Computing solutions. However, applying Edge Computing as a solution to overcome the network performance limitations that exist on an “IoT to Cloud” architecture while continuing to use Virtualization technology for system utilization is a bit of an oxymoron. Virtualization increases performance overheads, while sharing network resources among users and applications creates further bandwidth limitations and latency since communications are still served through the same physical network interfaces. The demand for network and system consistency, finer security and privacy has led to the deployment of Bare metal instances. Bare metal instances are nothing more than traditional servers that lack the virtualization layer offering native performance to the user. Furthermore, the rise of the ARM processors and the introduction of cheap low power architectures targeted to the Edge introduce a compelling new candidate platform especially on Bare metal instances. Live migration is a valuable tool for increasing applications and users’ mobility, service availability offering workload balancing and fault tolerance. However, live migration is tied to the existence of a virtualization layer therefore implementing a live migration process on Bare metal instances is very challenging. To the best of our knowledge, there is no existing proposal for a Bare metal live migration scheme on ARM based systems. Therefore, this thesis presents a novel design, implementation, and evaluation of an ARM based live migration scheme for Bare metal instances suitable for modern EdgeComputing Micro Data Centres. Our experimental evaluation confirms the effectiveness of our novel design as well as highlighting the importance on identifying the number of registers that describe and are critical for the reconstruction of the CPU state at the destination

準パススルー型仮想マシンモニタを用いたコンピュータシステム管理に関する研究

筑波大学 (University of Tsukuba)201

Migration of networks in multi-cloud environment

Tese de mestrado, Engenharia Informática (Arquitetura, Sistemas e Redes de Computadores) Universidade de Lisboa, Faculdade de Ciências, 2018A forma como os centros de dados e os recursos computacionais são geridos tem vindo a mudar. O uso exclusivo de servidores físicos e os complexos processos para provisionamento de software são já passado, sendo agora possível e simples usar recursos de uma terceira parte a pedido, na nuvem (cloud). A técnica central que permitiu esta evolução foi a virtualização, uma abstração dos recursos computacionais que torna o software mais independente do hardware em que é executado. Os avanços tecnológicos nesta área permitiram a migração de máquinas virtuais, agilizando ainda mais os processos de gestão e manutenção de recursos. A possibilidade de migrar máquinas virtuais libertou o software da infraestrutura física, facilitando uma série de tarefas como manutenção, balanceamento de carga, tratamento de faltas, entre outras. Hoje em dia a migração de máquinas virtuais é uma ferramenta essencial para gerir clouds, tanto públicas como privadas. Os sistemas informáticos de grande escala existentes na cloud são complexos, compostos por múltiplas partes que trabalham em conjunto para atingir os seus objectivos. O facto de os sistemas estarem intimamente ligados coloca pressão nos sistemas de comunicação e nas redes que os suportam. Esta dependência do sistema na infraestrutura de comunicação vem limitar a flexibilidade da migração de máquinas virtuais. Isto porque actualmente a gestão de uma rede é pouco flexível, limitando por exemplo a migração de VMs a uma subrede ou obrigando a um processo de reconfiguração de rede para a migração, um processo difícil, tipicamente manual e sujeito a falhas. Idealmente, a infraestrutura de que as máquinas virtuais necessitam para comunicar seria também virtual, permitindo migrar tanto as máquinas virtuais como a rede virtual. Abstrair os recursos de comunicação permitiria que todo o sistema tivesse a flexibilidade de ser transferido para outro local. Neste sentido foi recentemente proposta a migração de redes usando redes definidas por software (SDN), um novo paradigma que separa a infraestrutura de encaminhamento (plano de dados) do plano de controlo. Numa SDN a responsabilidade de tomar as decisões de controlo fica delegada num elemento logicamente centralizado, o controlador, que tem uma visão global da rede e do seu estado. Esta separação do plano de controlo do processo de encaminhamento veio facilitar a virtualização de redes. No entanto, as recentes propostas de virtualização de redes usando SDN apresentam limitações. Nomeadamente, estas soluções estão limitadas a um único centro de dados ou provedor de serviços. Esta dependência é um problema. Em primeiro lugar, confiar num único provedor ou cloud limita a disponibilidade, tornando efectivamente o provedor num ponto de falha único. Em segundo lugar, certos serviços ficam severamente limitados por recorrerem apenas a uma cloud, devido a requisitos especiais (de privacidade, por exemplo) ou mesmo legais (que podem obrigar a que, por exemplo, dados de utilizadores fiquem guardados no próprio país). Idealmente, seria possível ter a possibilidade de tirar partido de múltiplas clouds e poder, de forma transparente, aproveitar as vantagens de cada uma delas (por exemplo, umas por apresentarem custos mais reduzidos, outras pela sua localização). Tal possibilidade garantiria uma maior disponibilidade, visto que a falha de uma cloud não comprometeria todo o sistema. Além disso, poderia permitir baixar os custos porque seria possível aproveitar a variação dos preços existente entre clouds ao longo do tempo. Neste contexto multi-cloud um dos grandes desafios é conseguir migrar recursos entre clouds de forma a aproveitar os recursos existentes. Num ambiente SDN, em particular, a migração de redes é problemática porque é necessario que o controlador comunique com os elementos físicos da rede para implementar novas políticas e para que estes possam informar o controlador de novos eventos. Se a capacidade de comunicação entre o controlador e os elementos de rede for afectada (por exemplo, devido a latências elevadas de comunicação) o funcionamento da rede é também afectado. O trabalho que aqui propomos tem como objectivo desenvolver algoritmos de orquestração para migração de redes virtuais, com o objectivo de minimizar as latências na comunicação controlador-switches, em ambientes multi-cloud. Para esse efeito foi desenvolvida uma solução óptima, usando programação linear, e várias heurísticas. A solução de programação linear, sendo óptima, resulta na menor disrupção possível da ligação ao controlador. No entanto, a complexidade computacional desta solução limita a sua usabilidade, levando a tempos de execução elevados. Por esta razão são prospostas heurísticas que visam resolver o problema em tempo útil e de forma satisfatória. Os resultados das nossas experiências mostram que nas várias topologias testadas algumas heurísticas conseguem resultados próximos da solução óptima. O objectivo é atingido com tempos de execução consideravelmente inferiores.The way datacenters and computer resources are managed has been changing, from bare metal servers and complex deployment processes to on-demand cloud resources and applications. The main technology behind this evolution was virtualization. By abstracting the hardware, virtualization decoupled software from the hardware it runs on. Virtual machine (VM) migration further increased the flexibility of management and maintenance procedures. Tasks like maintenance, load balancing and fault handling were made easier. Today, the migration of virtual machines is a fundamental tool in public and private clouds. However as VMs rarely act alone, when the VMs migrate, the virtual networks should migrate too. Solutions to this problem using traditional networks have several limitations: they are integrated with the devices and are hard to manage. For these reasons the logical centralisation offered by Software-Defined Networking (SDN) architectures has been shown recently as an enabler for transparent migration of networks. In an SDN a controller remotely controls the network switches by installing flow rules that implement the policies defined by the network operator. Recent proposals are a good step forward but have problems. Namely, they are limited to a single data center or provider. The user’s dependency on a single cloud provider is a fundamental limitation. A large number of incidents involving accidental and malicious faults in cloud infrastructures show that relying on a single provider can lead to the creation of internet-scale single points of failures for cloud-based services. Furthermore, giving clients the power to choose how to use their cloud resources and the flexibility to easily change cloud providers is of great value, enabling clients to lower costs, tolerate cloud-wide outages and enhance security. The objective of this dissertation is therefore to design, implement and evaluate solutions for network migration in an environment of multiple clouds. The main goal is to schedule the migration of a network in such a way that the migration process has the least possible impact on the SDN controller’s ability to manage the network. This is achieved by creating a migration plan that aims to minimize the experienced control plane latency (i.e., the latency between the controller and the switches). We have developed an optimal solution based on a linear program, and several heuristics. Our results show that it is possible to achieve results close to the optimal solution, within reasonable time frames

Challenges in real-time virtualization and predictable cloud computing

Cloud computing and virtualization technology have revolutionized general-purpose computing applications in the past decade. The cloud paradigm offers advantages through reduction of operation costs, server consolidation, flexible system configuration and elastic resource provisioning. However, despite the success of cloud computing for general-purpose computing, existing cloud computing and virtualization technology face tremendous challenges in supporting emerging soft real-time applications such as online video streaming, cloud-based gaming, and telecommunication management. These applications demand real-time performance in open, shared and virtualized computing environments. This paper identifies the technical challenges in supporting real-time applications in the cloud, surveys recent advancement in real-time virtualization and cloud computing technology, and offers research directions to enable cloud-based real-time applications in the future

Cloud Computing cost and energy optimization through Federated Cloud SoS

2017 Fall.Includes bibliographical references.The two most significant differentiators amongst contemporary Cloud Computing service providers have increased green energy use and datacenter resource utilization. This work addresses these two issues from a system's architectural optimization viewpoint. The proposed approach herein, allows multiple cloud providers to utilize their individual computing resources in three ways by: (1) cutting the number of datacenters needed, (2) scheduling available datacenter grid energy via aggregators to reduce costs and power outages, and lastly by (3) utilizing, where appropriate, more renewable and carbon-free energy sources. Altogether our proposed approach creates an alternative paradigm for a Federated Cloud SoS approach. The proposed paradigm employs a novel control methodology that is tuned to obtain both financial and environmental advantages. It also supports dynamic expansion and contraction of computing capabilities for handling sudden variations in service demand as well as for maximizing usage of time varying green energy supplies. Herein we analyze the core SoS requirements, concept synthesis, and functional architecture with an eye on avoiding inadvertent cascading conditions. We suggest a physical architecture that diminishes unwanted outcomes while encouraging desirable results. Finally, in our approach, the constituent cloud services retain their independent ownership, objectives, funding, and sustainability means. This work analyzes the core SoS requirements, concept synthesis, and functional architecture. It suggests a physical structure that simulates the primary SoS emergent behavior to diminish unwanted outcomes while encouraging desirable results. The report will analyze optimal computing generation methods, optimal energy utilization for computing generation as well as a procedure for building optimal datacenters using a unique hardware computing system design based on the openCompute community as an illustrative collaboration platform. Finally, the research concludes with security features cloud federation requires to support to protect its constituents, its constituents tenants and itself from security risks

A Taxonomy of Virtualization Security Issues in Cloud Computing Environments

Objectives: To identify the main challenges and security issues of virtualization in cloud computing environments. It reviews the alleviation techniques for improving the security of cloud virtualization systems. Methods/ Statistical Analysis: Virtualization is a fundamental technology for cloud computing, and for this reason, any cloud vulnerabilities and threats affect virtualization. In this study, the systematic literature review is performed to find out the vulnerabilities and risks of virtualization in cloud computing and to identify threats, and attacks result from those vulnerabilities. Furthermore, we discover and analyze the effective mitigation techniques that are used to protect, secure, and manage virtualization environments. Findings: Thirty vulnerabilities are identified, explained, and classified into six proposed classes. Furthermore, fifteen main virtualization threats and attacks ar defined according to exploited vulnerabilities in a cloud environment. Application/Improvements: A set of common mitigation solutions are recognized and discovered to alleviate the virtualization security risks. These reviewed techniques are analyzed and evaluated according to five specified security criteria

QoS-aware service continuity in the virtualized edge

5G systems are envisioned to support numerous delay-sensitive applications such as the tactile Internet, mobile gaming, and augmented reality. Such applications impose new demands on service providers in terms of the quality of service (QoS) provided to the end-users. Achieving these demands in mobile 5G-enabled networks represent a technical and administrative challenge. One of the solutions proposed is to provide cloud computing capabilities at the edge of the network. In such vision, services are cloudified and encapsulated within the virtual machines or containers placed in cloud hosts at the network access layer. To enable ultrashort processing times and immediate service response, fast instantiation, and migration of service instances between edge nodes are mandatory to cope with the consequences of user’s mobility. This paper surveys the techniques proposed for service migration at the edge of the network. We focus on QoS-aware service instantiation and migration approaches, comparing the mechanisms followed and emphasizing their advantages and disadvantages. Then, we highlight the open research challenges still left unhandled.publishe