6,083 research outputs found
On a Catalogue of Metrics for Evaluating Commercial Cloud Services
Given the continually increasing amount of commercial Cloud services in the
market, evaluation of different services plays a significant role in
cost-benefit analysis or decision making for choosing Cloud Computing. In
particular, employing suitable metrics is essential in evaluation
implementations. However, to the best of our knowledge, there is not any
systematic discussion about metrics for evaluating Cloud services. By using the
method of Systematic Literature Review (SLR), we have collected the de facto
metrics adopted in the existing Cloud services evaluation work. The collected
metrics were arranged following different Cloud service features to be
evaluated, which essentially constructed an evaluation metrics catalogue, as
shown in this paper. This metrics catalogue can be used to facilitate the
future practice and research in the area of Cloud services evaluation.
Moreover, considering metrics selection is a prerequisite of benchmark
selection in evaluation implementations, this work also supplements the
existing research in benchmarking the commercial Cloud services.Comment: 10 pages, Proceedings of the 13th ACM/IEEE International Conference
on Grid Computing (Grid 2012), pp. 164-173, Beijing, China, September 20-23,
201
On Evaluating Commercial Cloud Services: A Systematic Review
Background: Cloud Computing is increasingly booming in industry with many
competing providers and services. Accordingly, evaluation of commercial Cloud
services is necessary. However, the existing evaluation studies are relatively
chaotic. There exists tremendous confusion and gap between practices and theory
about Cloud services evaluation. Aim: To facilitate relieving the
aforementioned chaos, this work aims to synthesize the existing evaluation
implementations to outline the state-of-the-practice and also identify research
opportunities in Cloud services evaluation. Method: Based on a conceptual
evaluation model comprising six steps, the Systematic Literature Review (SLR)
method was employed to collect relevant evidence to investigate the Cloud
services evaluation step by step. Results: This SLR identified 82 relevant
evaluation studies. The overall data collected from these studies essentially
represent the current practical landscape of implementing Cloud services
evaluation, and in turn can be reused to facilitate future evaluation work.
Conclusions: Evaluation of commercial Cloud services has become a world-wide
research topic. Some of the findings of this SLR identify several research gaps
in the area of Cloud services evaluation (e.g., the Elasticity and Security
evaluation of commercial Cloud services could be a long-term challenge), while
some other findings suggest the trend of applying commercial Cloud services
(e.g., compared with PaaS, IaaS seems more suitable for customers and is
particularly important in industry). This SLR study itself also confirms some
previous experiences and reveals new Evidence-Based Software Engineering (EBSE)
lessons
A Factor Framework for Experimental Design for Performance Evaluation of Commercial Cloud Services
Given the diversity of commercial Cloud services, performance evaluations of
candidate services would be crucial and beneficial for both service customers
(e.g. cost-benefit analysis) and providers (e.g. direction of service
improvement). Before an evaluation implementation, the selection of suitable
factors (also called parameters or variables) plays a prerequisite role in
designing evaluation experiments. However, there seems a lack of systematic
approaches to factor selection for Cloud services performance evaluation. In
other words, evaluators randomly and intuitively concerned experimental factors
in most of the existing evaluation studies. Based on our previous taxonomy and
modeling work, this paper proposes a factor framework for experimental design
for performance evaluation of commercial Cloud services. This framework
capsules the state-of-the-practice of performance evaluation factors that
people currently take into account in the Cloud Computing domain, and in turn
can help facilitate designing new experiments for evaluating Cloud services.Comment: 8 pages, Proceedings of the 4th International Conference on Cloud
Computing Technology and Science (CloudCom 2012), pp. 169-176, Taipei,
Taiwan, December 03-06, 201
Building an Expert System for Evaluation of Commercial Cloud Services
Commercial Cloud services have been increasingly supplied to customers in
industry. To facilitate customers' decision makings like cost-benefit analysis
or Cloud provider selection, evaluation of those Cloud services are becoming
more and more crucial. However, compared with evaluation of traditional
computing systems, more challenges will inevitably appear when evaluating
rapidly-changing and user-uncontrollable commercial Cloud services. This paper
proposes an expert system for Cloud evaluation that addresses emerging
evaluation challenges in the context of Cloud Computing. Based on the knowledge
and data accumulated by exploring the existing evaluation work, this expert
system has been conceptually validated to be able to give suggestions and
guidelines for implementing new evaluation experiments. As such, users can
conveniently obtain evaluation experiences by using this expert system, which
is essentially able to make existing efforts in Cloud services evaluation
reusable and sustainable.Comment: 8 page, Proceedings of the 2012 International Conference on Cloud and
Service Computing (CSC 2012), pp. 168-175, Shanghai, China, November 22-24,
201
Early Observations on Performance of Google Compute Engine for Scientific Computing
Although Cloud computing emerged for business applications in industry,
public Cloud services have been widely accepted and encouraged for scientific
computing in academia. The recently available Google Compute Engine (GCE) is
claimed to support high-performance and computationally intensive tasks, while
little evaluation studies can be found to reveal GCE's scientific capabilities.
Considering that fundamental performance benchmarking is the strategy of
early-stage evaluation of new Cloud services, we followed the Cloud Evaluation
Experiment Methodology (CEEM) to benchmark GCE and also compare it with Amazon
EC2, to help understand the elementary capability of GCE for dealing with
scientific problems. The experimental results and analyses show both potential
advantages of, and possible threats to applying GCE to scientific computing.
For example, compared to Amazon's EC2 service, GCE may better suit applications
that require frequent disk operations, while it may not be ready yet for single
VM-based parallel computing. Following the same evaluation methodology,
different evaluators can replicate and/or supplement this fundamental
evaluation of GCE. Based on the fundamental evaluation results, suitable GCE
environments can be further established for case studies of solving real
science problems.Comment: Proceedings of the 5th International Conference on Cloud Computing
Technologies and Science (CloudCom 2013), pp. 1-8, Bristol, UK, December 2-5,
201
DoKnowMe: Towards a Domain Knowledgedriven Methodology for Performance Evaluation
Software engineering considers performance evaluation to be one of the key portions of software quality assurance. Unfortunately, there seems to be a lack of standard methodologies for performance evaluation even in the scope of experimental computer science. Inspired by the concept of “instantiation” in object-oriented programming, we distinguish the generic performance evaluation logic from the distributed and ad-hoc relevant studies, and develop an abstract evaluation methodology (by analogy of “class”) we name Domain Knowledge-driven Methodology (DoKnowMe). By replacing five predefined domain-specific knowledge artefacts, DoKnowMe can be instantiated into specific methodologies (by analogy of “object”) to guide evaluators in performance evaluation of different software and even computing systems. We also propose a generic validation framework with four indicators (i.e. usefulness, feasibility, effectiveness and repeatability), and use it to validate DoKnowMe in the Cloud services evaluation domain. Given the positive and promising validation result, we plan to integrate more common evaluation strategies to improve DoKnowMe and further focus on the performance evaluation of Cloud autoscaler systems
Cloud Benchmarking for Performance
How can applications be deployed on the cloud to achieve maximum performance?
This question has become significant and challenging with the availability of a
wide variety of Virtual Machines (VMs) with different performance capabilities
in the cloud. The above question is addressed by proposing a six step
benchmarking methodology in which a user provides a set of four weights that
indicate how important each of the following groups: memory, processor,
computation and storage are to the application that needs to be executed on the
cloud. The weights along with cloud benchmarking data are used to generate a
ranking of VMs that can maximise performance of the application. The rankings
are validated through an empirical analysis using two case study applications;
the first is a financial risk application and the second is a molecular
dynamics simulation, which are both representative of workloads that can
benefit from execution on the cloud. Both case studies validate the feasibility
of the methodology and highlight that maximum performance can be achieved on
the cloud by selecting the top ranked VMs produced by the methodology.Comment: 6 pages, 6th IEEE International Conference on Cloud Computing
Technology and Science (IEEE CloudCom) 2014, Singapor
Cold Storage Data Archives: More Than Just a Bunch of Tapes
The abundance of available sensor and derived data from large scientific
experiments, such as earth observation programs, radio astronomy sky surveys,
and high-energy physics already exceeds the storage hardware globally
fabricated per year. To that end, cold storage data archives are the---often
overlooked---spearheads of modern big data analytics in scientific,
data-intensive application domains. While high-performance data analytics has
received much attention from the research community, the growing number of
problems in designing and deploying cold storage archives has only received
very little attention.
In this paper, we take the first step towards bridging this gap in knowledge
by presenting an analysis of four real-world cold storage archives from three
different application domains. In doing so, we highlight (i) workload
characteristics that differentiate these archives from traditional,
performance-sensitive data analytics, (ii) design trade-offs involved in
building cold storage systems for these archives, and (iii) deployment
trade-offs with respect to migration to the public cloud. Based on our
analysis, we discuss several other important research challenges that need to
be addressed by the data management community
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