345,487 research outputs found
Policy Conflict Analysis in Distributed System Management
Accepted versio
Towards goal-based autonomic networking
The ability to quickly deploy and efficiently manage services is critical to the telecommunications industry. Currently, services are designed and managed by different teams with expertise over a wide range of concerns, from high-level business to low level network aspects. Not only is this approach expensive in terms
of time and resources, but it also has problems to scale up to new outsourcing and/or multi-vendor models, where subsystems and teams belong to different organizations. We endorse the idea, upheld among others in the autonomic computing community, that the network and system components involved in the provision of a service must be crafted to facilitate their management. Furthermore, they should help bridge the gap between network and business concerns. In this paper, we sketch an approach based on
early work on the hierarchical organization of autonomic entities that possibly belong to different organizations. An autonomic entity governs over other autonomic entities by defining their goals. Thus, it is up to each autonomic entity to decide its line of actions in order to fulfill its goals, and the governing entity needs not know about the internals of its subordinates. We illustrate the approach with a simple but still rich example of a telecom service
Using Event Calculus to Formalise Policy Specification and Analysis
As the interest in using policy-based approaches for systems management grows, it is becoming increasingly important to develop methods for performing analysis and refinement of policy specifications. Although this is an area that researchers have devoted some attention to, none of the proposed solutions address the issues of analysing specifications that combine authorisation and management policies; analysing policy specifications that contain constraints on the applicability of the policies; and performing a priori analysis of the specification that will both detect the presence of inconsistencies and explain the situations in which the conflict will occur. We present a method for transforming both policy and system behaviour specifications into a formal notation that is based on event calculus. Additionally it describes how this formalism can be used in conjunction with abductive reasoning techniques to perform a priori analysis of policy specifications for the various conflict types identified in the literature. Finally, it presents some initial thoughts on how this notation and analysis technique could be used to perform policy refinement
Policy-based techniques for self-managing parallel applications
This paper presents an empirical investigation of policy-based self-management techniques for parallel applications executing in loosely-coupled environments. The dynamic and heterogeneous nature of these environments is discussed and the special considerations for parallel applications are identified. An adaptive strategy for the run-time deployment of tasks of parallel applications is presented. The strategy is based on embedding numerous policies which are informed by contextual and environmental inputs. The policies govern various aspects of behaviour, enhancing flexibility so that the goals of efficiency and performance are achieved despite high levels of environmental variability. A prototype self-managing parallel application is used as a vehicle to explore the feasibility and benefits of the strategy. In particular, several aspects of stability are investigated. The implementation and behaviour of three policies are discussed and sample results examined
Why (and How) Networks Should Run Themselves
The proliferation of networked devices, systems, and applications that we
depend on every day makes managing networks more important than ever. The
increasing security, availability, and performance demands of these
applications suggest that these increasingly difficult network management
problems be solved in real time, across a complex web of interacting protocols
and systems. Alas, just as the importance of network management has increased,
the network has grown so complex that it is seemingly unmanageable. In this new
era, network management requires a fundamentally new approach. Instead of
optimizations based on closed-form analysis of individual protocols, network
operators need data-driven, machine-learning-based models of end-to-end and
application performance based on high-level policy goals and a holistic view of
the underlying components. Instead of anomaly detection algorithms that operate
on offline analysis of network traces, operators need classification and
detection algorithms that can make real-time, closed-loop decisions. Networks
should learn to drive themselves. This paper explores this concept, discussing
how we might attain this ambitious goal by more closely coupling measurement
with real-time control and by relying on learning for inference and prediction
about a networked application or system, as opposed to closed-form analysis of
individual protocols
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
Incorporating prediction models in the SelfLet framework: a plugin approach
A complex pervasive system is typically composed of many cooperating
\emph{nodes}, running on machines with different capabilities, and pervasively
distributed across the environment. These systems pose several new challenges
such as the need for the nodes to manage autonomously and dynamically in order
to adapt to changes detected in the environment. To address the above issue, a
number of autonomic frameworks has been proposed. These usually offer either
predefined self-management policies or programmatic mechanisms for creating new
policies at design time. From a more theoretical perspective, some works
propose the adoption of prediction models as a way to anticipate the evolution
of the system and to make timely decisions. In this context, our aim is to
experiment with the integration of prediction models within a specific
autonomic framework in order to assess the feasibility of such integration in a
setting where the characteristics of dynamicity, decentralization, and
cooperation among nodes are important. We extend an existing infrastructure
called \emph{SelfLets} in order to make it ready to host various prediction
models that can be dynamically plugged and unplugged in the various component
nodes, thus enabling a wide range of predictions to be performed. Also, we show
in a simple example how the system works when adopting a specific prediction
model from the literature
Semantic-based policy engineering for autonomic systems
This paper presents some important directions in the use of ontology-based semantics in achieving the vision of Autonomic Communications. We examine the requirements of Autonomic Communication with a focus on the demanding needs of ubiquitous computing environments, with an emphasis on the requirements shared with Autonomic Computing. We observe that ontologies provide a strong mechanism for addressing the heterogeneity in user task requirements, managed resources, services and context. We then present two complimentary approaches that exploit ontology-based knowledge in support of autonomic communications: service-oriented models for policy engineering and dynamic semantic queries using content-based networks. The paper concludes with a discussion of the major research challenges such approaches raise
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