Cloud Service Brokerage 2013 - Methods and Mechanisms

In the future, the Cloud will evolve into a rich ecosystem of service providers and consumers, each building upon the offerings of others. Cloud service brokers will play an important role, mediating between providers and consumers. As well as providing vertical integration and value-added aggregation of services, brokers will play an increased role in continuous quality assurance and optimization. This may range from setting common standards for service specification, providing mechanisms for lifecycle governance and service certification, to automatic arbitrage respecting consumer preferences, continuous optimization of service delivery, failure prevention and recovery at runtime. This workshop introduces some of these anticipated methods and investigates some of the mechanisms envisaged in future Cloud service brokerage

Cloud application portability: an initial view.

Growing interest towards cloud application platforms has resulted in a large number of platform offerings to be already available on the market and new related products to be continuously launched. However, there are a number of challenges that prevent cloud application platforms from becoming widely adopted. One such challenge is application portability. This paper reports on an ongoing effort to explore the area of cloud application portability. We briefly examine the issue of heterogeneity in cloud platforms and highlight specific platform characteristics that may hinder the portability of cloud applications. We present some high level approaches and existing work that attempts to address this challenge. In order to narrow down the area of our exploration we have been carrying out an experiment in cross-platform application development and deployment with four prominent cloud platforms: OpenShift, Google App Engine, Heroku, and Amazon Elastic Beanstalk. We briefly discuss our initial conclusions from this ongoing experimentation

Cloud Service Brokerage-2014: Towards the Multi-cloud Ecosystem

In the future multi-cloud ecosystem, many cloud providers and consumers will interact to create, discover, negotiate and use software services. Cloud service brokers will play a central role in bringing providers and consumers together, assisting with software service creation (from abstract models to platform-specific deployments), multi-cloud translation (model-driven adaptation and deployment of services) quality assurance (governance; functional testing and monitoring), service continuity (failure prevention and recovery) and market competition (arbitrage; service optimization; service customization). The emerging ecosystem will be supported by common standards, service models, methods and mechanisms that will operate across a wide variety of platforms and infrastructure, and across disparate service protocols

PaaSword: A Holistic Data Privacy and Security by Design Framework for Cloud Services

Enterprises increasingly recognize the compelling economic and operational benefits from virtualizing and pooling IT resources in the cloud. Nevertheless, the significant and valuable transformation of organizations that adopt cloud computing is accompanied by a number of security threats that should be considered. In this position paper, we outline significant security challenges presented when migrating to a cloud environment and propose PaaSword - a novel holistic framework that aspires to alleviate these challenges. Specifically, this proposed framework involves a context-aware security model, the necessary policies enforcement mechanism along with a physical distribution, encryption and query middleware

Towards a framework for monitoring cloud application platforms as sensor networks

With the continued growth in software environments on cloud application platforms, self-management at the Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) level has become a pressing concern, and the run-time monitoring, analysis and detection of critical situations are all fundamental requirements if we are to achieve autonomic behaviour in complex PaaS environments. In this paper we focus on cloud application platforms offering their customers a range of generic built-in re-usable services. By identifying key characteristics of these complex dynamic systems, we compare cloud application platforms to distributed sensor networks, and investigate the viability of exploiting these similarities with a case study. We treat cloud data storage services as “virtual” sensors constantly emitting monitoring data, such as numbers of connections and storage space availability, which are then analysed by the central component of a monitoring framework so as to detect and react to SLA violations. We discuss the potential benefits, as well as some shortcomings, of adopting this approach

A Bayesian Logistic Regression approach in Asthma Persistence Prediction

Background: A number of models based on clinical parameters have been used for the prediction of asthma persistence in children. The number and significance of factors that are used in a proposed model play a cardinal role in prediction accuracy. Different models may lead to different significant variables. In addition, the accuracy of a model in medicine is really important since an accurate prediction of illness persistence may improve prevention and treatment intervention for the children at risk. Methods: Data from 147 asthmatic children were analyzed by a new method for predicting asthma outcome using Principal Component Analysis (PCA) in combination with a Bayesian logistic regression approach implemented by the Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC). The use of PCA is required due to multicollinearity among the explanatory variables. Results: This method using the most appropriate models seems to predict asthma with an accuracy of 84.076% and 86.3673%, a Sensitivity of 84.96% and 87.25% and a Specificity of 83.22% and 85.52%, respectively. Conclusion: Our approach predicts asthma with high accuracy, gives steadier results in terms of positive and negative patients and provides better information about the influence of each factor (demographic, symptoms etc.) in asthma prediction

Policy management and enforcement using OWL and SWRL for the internet of things

© Springer International Publishing AG 2017. As the number of connected devices is exponentially growing, the IoT community is investigating potential ways of overcoming the resulting heterogeneity to enable device compatibility, interoperability and integration. The Semantic Web technologies, frequently used to address these issues, have been employed to develop a number of ontological frameworks, aiming to provide a common vocabulary of terms for the IoT domain. Defined in Web Ontology Language – a language based on the Description Logics, and thus equipped with the ‘off-the-shelf’ support for formal reasoning – these ontologies, however, seem to neglect the built-in automated reasoning capabilities. Accordingly, this paper discusses the possibility of leveraging this idle potential for automated analysis in the context of defining and enforcing policies for the IoT. As a first step towards a proof of concept, the paper focuses on a simple use case and, using the existing IoT-Lite ontology, demonstrates different types of semantic classification to enable policy enforcement. As a result, it becomes possible to detect a critical situation, when a dangerous temperature threshold has been exceeded. With the proposed approach, IoT practitioners are offered an already existing, reliable and optimised policy enforcement mechanism. Moreover, they are also expected to benefit from support for policy governance, separation of concerns, a declarative approach to knowledge engineering, and an extensible architecture

Leveraging Platform Basic Services in Cloud Application Platforms for the Development of Cloud Applications.

Cloud application platforms gain popularity and have the potential to alter the way service based cloud applications are developed involving utilisation of platform basic services. A platform basic service is considered as a piece of software, which provides certain functionality and is usually offered via a web API, e.g. e-mail, payment, authentication service. However, the proliferation and diversification of platform basic services and the available providers increase the challenge for the application developers to integrate them and deal with the heterogeneous providers' web APIs. Therefore, a new approach of developing applications should be adopted in which developers leverage multiple platform basic services independently from the target application platforms. To this end, this paper presents a development framework whose objective is to enable the consistent integration of the platform services, and to allow the seamless use of the concrete providers by alleviating the heterogeneities among them