Challenges for the comprehensive management of cloud services in a PaaS framework

The 4CaaSt project aims at developing a PaaS framework that enables flexible definition, marketing, deployment and management of Cloud-based services and applications. The major innovations proposed by 4CaaSt are the blueprint and its lifecycle management, a one stop shop for Cloud services and a PaaS level resource management featuring elasticity. 4CaaSt also provides a portfolio of ready to use Cloud native services and Cloud-aware immigrant technologies

Toward Customizable Multi-tenant SaaS Applications

abstract: Nowadays, Computing is so pervasive that it has become indeed the 5th utility (after water, electricity, gas, telephony) as Leonard Kleinrock once envisioned. Evolved from utility computing, cloud computing has emerged as a computing infrastructure that enables rapid delivery of computing resources as a utility in a dynamically scalable, virtualized manner. However, the current industrial cloud computing implementations promote segregation among different cloud providers, which leads to user lockdown because of prohibitive migration cost. On the other hand, Service-Orented Computing (SOC) including service-oriented architecture (SOA) and Web Services (WS) promote standardization and openness with its enabling standards and communication protocols. This thesis proposes a Service-Oriented Cloud Computing Architecture by combining the best attributes of the two paradigms to promote an open, interoperable environment for cloud computing development. Mutil-tenancy SaaS applicantions built on top of SOCCA have more flexibility and are not locked down by a certain platform. Tenants residing on a multi-tenant application appear to be the sole owner of the application and not aware of the existence of others. A multi-tenant SaaS application accommodates each tenant’s unique requirements by allowing tenant-level customization. A complex SaaS application that supports hundreds, even thousands of tenants could have hundreds of customization points with each of them providing multiple options, and this could result in a huge number of ways to customize the application. This dissertation also proposes innovative customization approaches, which studies similar tenants’ customization choices and each individual users behaviors, then provides guided semi-automated customization process for the future tenants. A semi-automated customization process could enable tenants to quickly implement the customization that best suits their business needs.Dissertation/ThesisDoctoral Dissertation Computer Science 201

Information Technology Evaluation: Review and Criticism

Nowadays almost all aspects in human life influenced by information technology. Almost all devices used by human were controlled by computer systems. Lot of investments were made, with not much of evaluation and feedback of the gained benefits were reported. This study tries to figure out how Information Technology is evaluated, approaches that been done, and critics for continually improvement. Review is started with IT-paradox, followed by IT-success, IT-values, IT-evaluations, IT-adoptions, and IT-management. Manuscript is ended with critics and discussion, implications, and conclusion

Service Quality Assessment for Cloud-based Distributed Data Services

The issue of less-than-100% reliability and trust-worthiness of third-party controlled cloud components (e.g., IaaS and SaaS components from different vendors) may lead to laxity in the QoS guarantees offered by a service-support system S to various applications. An example of S is a replicated data service to handle customer queries with fault-tolerance and performance goals. QoS laxity (i.e., SLA violations) may be inadvertent: say, due to the inability of system designers to model the impact of sub-system behaviors onto a deliverable QoS. Sometimes, QoS laxity may even be intentional: say, to reap revenue-oriented benefits by cheating on resource allocations and/or excessive statistical-sharing of system resources (e.g., VM cycles, number of servers). Our goal is to assess how well the internal mechanisms of S are geared to offer a required level of service to the applications. We use computational models of S to determine the optimal feasible resource schedules and verify how close is the actual system behavior to a model-computed \u27gold-standard\u27. Our QoS assessment methods allow comparing different service vendors (possibly with different business policies) in terms of canonical properties: such as elasticity, linearity, isolation, and fairness (analogical to a comparative rating of restaurants). Case studies of cloud-based distributed applications are described to illustrate our QoS assessment methods. Specific systems studied in the thesis are: i) replicated data services where the servers may be hosted on multiple data-centers for fault-tolerance and performance reasons; and ii) content delivery networks to geographically distributed clients where the content data caches may reside on different data-centers. The methods studied in the thesis are useful in various contexts of QoS management and self-configurations in large-scale cloud-based distributed systems that are inherently complex due to size, diversity, and environment dynamicity

A survey on security issues and solutions at different layers of Cloud computing

Cloud computing offers scalable on-demand services to consumers with greater flexibility and lesser infrastructure investment. Since Cloud services are delivered using classical network protocols and formats over the Internet, implicit vulnerabilities existing in these protocols as well as threats introduced by newer architectures raise many security and privacy concerns. In this paper, we survey the factors affecting Cloud computing adoption, vulnerabilities and attacks, and identify relevant solution directives to strengthen security and privacy in the Cloud environment