Scalability analysis comparisons of cloud-based software services

Performance and scalability testing and measurements of cloud-based software services are necessary for future optimizations and growth of cloud computing. Scalability, elasticity, and efficiency are interrelated aspects of cloud-based software services’ performance requirements. In this work, we use a technical measurement of the scalability of cloud-based software services. Our technical scalability metrics are inspired by metrics of elasticity. We used two cloud-based systems to demonstrate the usefulness of our metrics and compare their scalability performance in two cloud platforms: Amazon EC2 and Microsoft Azure. Our experimental analysis considers three sets of comparisons: first we compare the same cloud-based software service hosted on two different public cloud platforms; second we compare two different cloud-based software services hosted on the same cloud platform; finally, we compare between the same cloud-based software service hosted on the same cloud platform with two different auto-scaling policies. We note that our technical scalability metrics can be integrated into a previously proposed utility oriented metric of scalability. We discuss the implications of our work

Scalability performance measurement and testing of cloud-based software services

Cloud-based software services have become more popular and dependable and are ideal for businesses with growing or changing workload demands. These services are increasing rapidly due to the reduced hosting costs and the increased availability and efficiency of computing resources. The delivery of cloud-based software services is based on the underlying cloud infrastructure supported by cloud providers, which delivers the potential for scalability that follows the pay-as-you-go model. Performance and scalability testing and measurements of those services are necessary for future optimisations and growth of cloud computing to support the Service Level Agreement (SLA) compliant quality of cloud services, especially in the context of rapidly expanding quantity of service delivery. This thesis addresses an important issue, understanding the scalability of cloud-based software services from a technical perspective, which is very important as more software solutions are migrated to the cloud. A novel testing and quantifying approach for the scalability performance of cloud-based software services is described. Two technical scalability metrics for software services that have been deployed and distributed in cloud environments, have been formulated: volume and quality scalability metrics based on the number of software instances and the average response time. The experimental analysis comprises three stages. The first stage involves demonstrating the approach and the metrics using real-world could-based software service running on Amazon EC2 cloud using three demand scenarios. The second stage aims to extend the practicality of the metrics with experiments on two public cloud environments (Amazon EC2 and Microsoft Azure) with two cloud-based software serices to demonstrate the use of these metrics. The experimental analysis considers three sets of comparisons to provide the platform to construct the metrics as a basis that can be used effectively to compare the scalability of software on cloud environments, consequently supporting deployment decisions with technical arguments. Moreover, the work integrates the technical scalability metrics with an earlier utility-oriented scalability metric. The third stage is a case study of application-level fault inection using real-world cloud-based software services running on Amazon EC2 cloud to demonstrate the effect of fault scenarios on the scalability behaviour. The results show that the technical metrics quantify explicitly the technical scalability performance of the cloud-based software services, and that they allow clear assessment of the impact of demand scenarios, cloud platform and fault injection on the software services’ scalability behaviour. The studies undertaken in this thesis have provided a valuable insight into the scalability of cloud-based software services delivery

A proposed case for the cloud software engineering in security

This paper presents Cloud Software Engineering in Security (CSES) proposal that combines the benefits from each of good software engineering process and security. While other literature does not provide a proposal for Cloud security as yet, we use Business Process Modeling Notation (BPMN) to illustrate the concept of CSES from its design, implementation and test phases. BPMN can be used to raise alarm for protecting Cloud security in a real case scenario in real-time. Results from BPMN simulations show that a long execution time of 60 hours is required to protect real-time security of 2 petabytes (PB). When data is not in use, BPMN simulations show that the execution time for all data security rapidly falls off. We demonstrate a proposal to deal with Cloud security and aim to improve its current performance for Big Data

The state of SQL-on-Hadoop in the cloud

Managed Hadoop in the cloud, especially SQL-on-Hadoop, has been gaining attention recently. On Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS), analytical services like Hive and Spark come preconfigured for general-purpose and ready to use. Thus, giving companies a quick entry and on-demand deployment of ready SQL-like solutions for their big data needs. This study evaluates cloud services from an end-user perspective, comparing providers including: Microsoft Azure, Amazon Web Services, Google Cloud, and Rackspace. The study focuses on performance, readiness, scalability, and cost-effectiveness of the different solutions at entry/test level clusters sizes. Results are based on over 15,000 Hive queries derived from the industry standard TPC-H benchmark. The study is framed within the ALOJA research project, which features an open source benchmarking and analysis platform that has been recently extended to support SQL-on-Hadoop engines. The ALOJA Project aims to lower the total cost of ownership (TCO) of big data deployments and study their performance characteristics for optimization. The study benchmarks cloud providers across a diverse range instance types, and uses input data scales from 1GB to 1TB, in order to survey the popular entry-level PaaS SQL-on-Hadoop solutions, thereby establishing a common results-base upon which subsequent research can be carried out by the project. Initial results already show the main performance trends to both hardware and software configuration, pricing, similarities and architectural differences of the evaluated PaaS solutions. Whereas some providers focus on decoupling storage and computing resources while offering network-based elastic storage, others choose to keep the local processing model from Hadoop for high performance, but reducing flexibility. Results also show the importance of application-level tuning and how keeping up-to-date hardware and software stacks can influence performance even more than replicating the on-premises model in the cloud.This work is partially supported by the Microsoft Azure for Research program, the European Research Council (ERC) under the EUs Horizon 2020 programme (GA 639595), the Spanish Ministry of Education (TIN2015-65316-P), and the Generalitat de Catalunya (2014-SGR-1051).Peer ReviewedPostprint (author's final draft

The Making of Cloud Applications An Empirical Study on Software Development for the Cloud

Cloud computing is gaining more and more traction as a deployment and provisioning model for software. While a large body of research already covers how to optimally operate a cloud system, we still lack insights into how professional software engineers actually use clouds, and how the cloud impacts development practices. This paper reports on the first systematic study on how software developers build applications in the cloud. We conducted a mixed-method study, consisting of qualitative interviews of 25 professional developers and a quantitative survey with 294 responses. Our results show that adopting the cloud has a profound impact throughout the software development process, as well as on how developers utilize tools and data in their daily work. Among other things, we found that (1) developers need better means to anticipate runtime problems and rigorously define metrics for improved fault localization and (2) the cloud offers an abundance of operational data, however, developers still often rely on their experience and intuition rather than utilizing metrics. From our findings, we extracted a set of guidelines for cloud development and identified challenges for researchers and tool vendors

HPC Cloud for Scientific and Business Applications: Taxonomy, Vision, and Research Challenges

High Performance Computing (HPC) clouds are becoming an alternative to on-premise clusters for executing scientific applications and business analytics services. Most research efforts in HPC cloud aim to understand the cost-benefit of moving resource-intensive applications from on-premise environments to public cloud platforms. Industry trends show hybrid environments are the natural path to get the best of the on-premise and cloud resources---steady (and sensitive) workloads can run on on-premise resources and peak demand can leverage remote resources in a pay-as-you-go manner. Nevertheless, there are plenty of questions to be answered in HPC cloud, which range from how to extract the best performance of an unknown underlying platform to what services are essential to make its usage easier. Moreover, the discussion on the right pricing and contractual models to fit small and large users is relevant for the sustainability of HPC clouds. This paper brings a survey and taxonomy of efforts in HPC cloud and a vision on what we believe is ahead of us, including a set of research challenges that, once tackled, can help advance businesses and scientific discoveries. This becomes particularly relevant due to the fast increasing wave of new HPC applications coming from big data and artificial intelligence.Comment: 29 pages, 5 figures, Published in ACM Computing Surveys (CSUR

Towards the cloudification of the social networks analytics

In the last years, with the increase of the available data from social networks and the rise of big data technologies, social data has emerged as one of the most profitable market for companies to increase their benefits. Besides, social computation scientists see such data as a vast ocean of information to study modern human societies. Nowadays, enterprises and researchers are developing their own mining tools in house, or they are outsourcing their social media mining needs to specialised companies with its consequent economical cost. In this paper, we present the first cloud computing service to facilitate the deployment of social media analytics applications to allow data practitioners to use social mining tools as a service. The main advantage of this service is the possibility to run different queries at the same time and combine their results in real time. Additionally, we also introduce twearch, a prototype to develop twitter mining algorithms as services in the cloud.Peer ReviewedPostprint (author’s final draft