Cloud Computing For Iraqi Ministry Of Finance

Cloud Computing, the long-held dream of computing as a utility, has the potential to transform a large part of the IT industry, making software even more attractive as a service and shaping the way IT hardware is designed and purchased. Developers with innovative ideas for new Internet services no longer require the large capital outlays in hardware to deploy their service or the human expense to operate it. They need not be concerned about over provisioning for a service whose popularity does not meet their predictions, thus wasting costly resources, or under provisioning for one that becomes wildly popular, thus missing potential customers and revenue. Moreover, companies with large batch-oriented tasks can get results as quickly as their programs can scale, since using 1000 servers for one hour costs no more than using one server for 1000 hours. This elasticity of resources, without paying a premium for large scale, is unprecedented in the history of IT. Cloud Computing refers to both the applications delivered as services over the Internet and the hardware and systems software in the datacenters that provide those services. The services themselves have long been referred to as Software as a Service (SaaS) [2]. The datacenter hardware and software is what we will call a Cloud. When a Cloud is made available in a pay-as-you-go manner to the general public, we call it a Public Cloud; the service being sold is Utility Computing. We use the term Private Cloud to refer to internal datacenters of a business or other organization, not made available to the general public. Thus, Cloud Computing is the sum of SaaS and Utility Computing, but does not include Private Clouds. People can be users or providers of SaaS, or users or providers of Utility Computing. We focus on SaaS Providers (Cloud Users) and Cloud Providers, which have received less attention than SaaS Users. From a hardware point of view, three aspects are new in Cloud Computing [3]

DEPAS: A Decentralized Probabilistic Algorithm for Auto-Scaling

The dynamic provisioning of virtualized resources offered by cloud computing infrastructures allows applications deployed in a cloud environment to automatically increase and decrease the amount of used resources. This capability is called auto-scaling and its main purpose is to automatically adjust the scale of the system that is running the application to satisfy the varying workload with minimum resource utilization. The need for auto-scaling is particularly important during workload peaks, in which applications may need to scale up to extremely large-scale systems. Both the research community and the main cloud providers have already developed auto-scaling solutions. However, most research solutions are centralized and not suitable for managing large-scale systems, moreover cloud providers' solutions are bound to the limitations of a specific provider in terms of resource prices, availability, reliability, and connectivity. In this paper we propose DEPAS, a decentralized probabilistic auto-scaling algorithm integrated into a P2P architecture that is cloud provider independent, thus allowing the auto-scaling of services over multiple cloud infrastructures at the same time. Our simulations, which are based on real service traces, show that our approach is capable of: (i) keeping the overall utilization of all the instantiated cloud resources in a target range, (ii) maintaining service response times close to the ones obtained using optimal centralized auto-scaling approaches.Comment: Submitted to Springer Computin

A Hybrid Job Scheduling Approach on Cloud Computing Environments on the Usage of Heuristics and Metaheuristics Methods

The Information Technology Industry has been revolutionized through Cloud Computing by offering dynamic computing services to users through its on-demand provisioning of scalable and virtualized resources over the internet on a pay-per-use measured basis. Performance improvements in task scheduling can have a great impact on the efficiency of cloud computing. This paper proposes a hybrid task scheduling approach which employs the metaheuristic optimization technique, genetic algorithm to produce a certain combination of scheduling heuristics for processing cloud workloads. This approach is developed to optimize the performance metrics namely makespan, average flow time, throughput, and average waiting time. The developed approach is evaluated on the CloudSimPlus simulation framework using large-scale benchmarks against other heuristics in terms of the stated performance metrics. The results indicate that the proposed hybrid approach consistently outperforms the baseline individual heuristics in terms of the stated metrics irrespective of the scale of the workload. It is also observed that the optimization potential tends to increase as the workload scale becomes heavier and optimizing flow time produces complementary effects on the other metrics

Improving the Performance of Cloud-based Scientific Services

Cloud computing provides access to a large scale set of readily available computing resources at the click of a button. The cloud paradigm has commoditised computing capacity and is often touted as a low-cost model for executing and scaling applications. However, there are significant technical challenges associated with selecting, acquiring, configuring, and managing cloud resources which can restrict the efficient utilisation of cloud capabilities. Scientific computing is increasingly hosted on cloud infrastructure—in which scientific capabilities are delivered to the broad scientific community via Internet-accessible services. This migration from on-premise to on-demand cloud infrastructure is motivated by the sporadic usage patterns of scientific workloads and the associated potential cost savings without the need to purchase, operate, and manage compute infrastructure—a task that few scientific users are trained to perform. However, cloud platforms are not an automatic solution. Their flexibility is derived from an enormous number of services and configuration options, which in turn result in significant complexity for the user. In fact, naïve cloud usage can result in poor performance and excessive costs, which are then directly passed on to researchers. This thesis presents methods for developing efficient cloud-based scientific services. Three real-world scientific services are analysed and a set of common requirements are derived. To address these requirements, this thesis explores automated and scalable methods for inferring network performance, considers various trade-offs (e.g., cost and performance) when provisioning instances, and profiles application performance, all in heterogeneous and dynamic cloud environments. Specifically, network tomography provides the mechanisms to infer network performance in dynamic and opaque cloud networks; cost-aware automated provisioning approaches enable services to consider, in real-time, various trade-offs such as cost, performance, and reliability; and automated application profiling allows a huge search space of applications, instance types, and configurations to be analysed to determine resource requirements and application performance. Finally, these contributions are integrated into an extensible and modular cloud provisioning and resource management service called SCRIMP. Cloud-based scientific applications and services can subscribe to SCRIMP to outsource their provisioning, usage, and management of cloud infrastructures. Collectively, the approaches presented in this thesis are shown to provide order of magnitude cost savings and significant performance improvement when employed by production scientific services

Reconsidering big data security and privacy in cloud and mobile cloud systems

Large scale distributed systems in particular cloud and mobile cloud deployments provide great services improving people\u27s quality of life and organizational efficiency. In order to match the performance needs, cloud computing engages with the perils of peer-to-peer (P2P) computing and brings up the P2P cloud systems as an extension for federated cloud. Having a decentralized architecture built on independent nodes and resources without any specific central control and monitoring, these cloud deployments are able to handle resource provisioning at a very low cost. Hence, we see a vast amount of mobile applications and services that are ready to scale to billions of mobile devices painlessly. Among these, data driven applications are the most successful ones in terms of popularity or monetization. However, data rich applications expose other problems to consider including storage, big data processing and also the crucial task of protecting private or sensitive information. In this work, first, we go through the existing layered cloud architectures and present a solution addressing the big data storage. Secondly, we explore the use of P2P Cloud System (P2PCS) for big data processing and analytics. Thirdly, we propose an efficient hybrid mobile cloud computing model based on cloudlets concept and we apply this model to health care systems as a case study. Then, the model is simulated using Mobile Cloud Computing Simulator (MCCSIM). According to the experimental power and delay results, the hybrid cloud model performs up to 75% better when compared to the traditional cloud models. Lastly, we enhance our proposals by presenting and analyzing security and privacy countermeasures against possible attacks