On the Benefits of Transparent Compression for Cost-Effective Cloud Data Storage

International audienceInfrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) cloud computing has revolutionized the way we think of acquiring computational resources: it allows users to deploy virtual machines (VMs) at large scale and pay only for the resources that were actually used throughout the runtime of the VMs. This new model raises new challenges in the design and development of IaaS middleware: excessive storage costs associated with both user data and VM images might make the cloud less attractive, especially for users that need to manipulate huge data sets and a large number of VM images. Storage costs result not only from storage space utilization, but also from bandwidth consumption: in typical deployments, a large number of data transfers between the VMs and the persistent storage are performed, all under high performance requirements. This paper evaluates the trade-off resulting from transparently applying data compression to conserve storage space and bandwidth at the cost of slight computational overhead. We aim at reducing the storage space and bandwidth needs with minimal impact on data access performance. Our solution builds on BlobSeer, a distributed data management service specifically designed to sustain a high throughput for concurrent accesses to huge data sequences that are distributed at large scale. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our approach achieves large reductions (at least 40%) of bandwidth and storage space utilization, while still attaining high performance levels that even surpass the original (no compression) performance levels in several data-intensive scenarios

Critical analysis of vendor lock-in and its impact on cloud computing migration: a business perspective

Vendor lock-in is a major barrier to the adoption of cloud computing, due to the lack of standardization. Current solutions and efforts tackling the vendor lock-in problem are predominantly technology-oriented. Limited studies exist to analyse and highlight the complexity of vendor lock-in problem in the cloud environment. Consequently, most customers are unaware of proprietary standards which inhibit interoperability and portability of applications when taking services from vendors. This paper provides a critical analysis of the vendor lock-in problem, from a business perspective. A survey based on qualitative and quantitative approaches conducted in this study has identified the main risk factors that give rise to lock-in situations. The analysis of our survey of 114 participants shows that, as computing resources migrate from on-premise to the cloud, the vendor lock-in problem is exacerbated. Furthermore, the findings exemplify the importance of interoperability, portability and standards in cloud computing. A number of strategies are proposed on how to avoid and mitigate lock-in risks when migrating to cloud computing. The strategies relate to contracts, selection of vendors that support standardised formats and protocols regarding standard data structures and APIs, developing awareness of commonalities and dependencies among cloud-based solutions. We strongly believe that the implementation of these strategies has a great potential to reduce the risks of vendor lock-in

Energy Prediction for Cloud Workload Patterns

The excessive use of energy consumption in Cloud infrastructures has become one of the major cost factors for Cloud providers to maintain. In order to enhance the energy efficiency of Cloud resources, proactive and reactive management tools are used. However, these tools need to be supported with energy-awareness not only at the physical machine (PM) level but also at virtual machine (VM) level in order to enhance decision-making. This paper introduces an energy-aware profiling model to identify energy consumption for heterogeneous and homogeneous VMs running on the same PM and presents an energy-aware prediction framework to forecast future VMs energy consumption. This framework first predicts the VMs’ workload based on historical workload patterns using Autoregressive Integrated Moving Average (ARIMA) model. The predicted VM workload is then correlated to the physical resources within this framework in order to get the predicted VM energy consumption. Compared with actual results obtained in a real Cloud testbed, the predicted results show that this energy-aware prediction framework can get up to 2.58 Mean Percentage Error (MPE) for the VM workload prediction, and up to −4.47 MPE for the VM energy prediction based on periodic workload pattern

Agenda de investigación: smart cities y seguridad en Andalucía = Research agenda: smart cities and security in Andalusia, Spain

Smart cities' security governance is a significant challenge that requires careful planning, design, and management. Unfortunately, the number of Andalusian researchers and research groups working on this topic is currently limited, which hinders scientific progress, international competitiveness, and knowledge transfer. To address this issue, this project aims to establish a research agenda to identify the most relevant topics, facilitate resource allocation, and encourage collaboration among researchers, industry, and the public sector. In the near future, effective security management in smart cities will require multidisciplinary approaches that bring together experts from various fields. By promoting coherent initiatives and establishing robust research programs, we can build a strong foundation for sustainable smart cities.P20-00941Security and Global Affair

INDIGO-DataCloud: a Platform to Facilitate Seamless Access to E-Infrastructures

[EN] This paper describes the achievements of the H2020 project INDIGO-DataCloud. The project has provided e-infrastructures with tools, applications and cloud framework enhancements to manage the demanding requirements of scientific communities, either locally or through enhanced interfaces. The middleware developed allows to federate hybrid resources, to easily write, port and run scientific applications to the cloud. In particular, we have extended existing PaaS (Platform as a Service) solutions, allowing public and private e-infrastructures, including those provided by EGI, EUDAT, and Helix Nebula, to integrate their existing services and make them available through AAI services compliant with GEANT interfederation policies, thus guaranteeing transparency and trust in the provisioning of such services. Our middleware facilitates the execution of applications using containers on Cloud and Grid based infrastructures, as well as on HPC clusters. Our developments are freely downloadable as open source components, and are already being integrated into many scientific applications.INDIGO-Datacloud has been funded by the European Commision H2020 research and innovation program under grant agreement RIA 653549.Salomoni, D.; Campos, I.; Gaido, L.; Marco, J.; Solagna, P.; Gomes, J.; Matyska, L.... (2018). INDIGO-DataCloud: a Platform to Facilitate Seamless Access to E-Infrastructures. Journal of Grid Computing. 16(3):381-408. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10723-018-9453-3S381408163García, A.L., Castillo, E.F.-d., Puel, M.: Identity federation with VOMS in cloud infrastructures. In: 2013 IEEE 5Th International Conference on Cloud Computing Technology and Science, pp 42–48 (2013)Chadwick, D.W., Siu, K., Lee, C., Fouillat, Y., Germonville, D.: Adding federated identity management to OpenStack. Journal of Grid Computing 12(1), 3–27 (2014)Craig, A.L.: A design space review for general federation management using keystone. 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Privacy enhancing technologies (PETs) for connected vehicles in smart cities

This is an accepted manuscript of an article published by Wiley in Transactions on Emerging Telecommunications Technologies, available online: https://doi.org/10.1002/ett.4173 The accepted version of the publication may differ from the final published version.Many Experts believe that the Internet of Things (IoT) is a new revolution in technology that has brought many benefits for our organizations, businesses, and industries. However, information security and privacy protection are important challenges particularly for smart vehicles in smart cities that have attracted the attention of experts in this domain. Privacy Enhancing Technologies (PETs) endeavor to mitigate the risk of privacy invasions, but the literature lacks a thorough review of the approaches and techniques that support individuals' privacy in the connection between smart vehicles and smart cities. This gap has stimulated us to conduct this research with the main goal of reviewing recent privacy-enhancing technologies, approaches, taxonomy, challenges, and solutions on the application of PETs for smart vehicles in smart cities. The significant aspect of this study originates from the inclusion of data-oriented and process-oriented privacy protection. This research also identifies limitations of existing PETs, complementary technologies, and potential research directions.Published onlin

Application of Quality of Experience in Networked Services: Review, Trend & Perspectives

Full text embargoed until 17.10.2019 (publisher's embargo period, 12 months

Implementing Elastic Capacity in a Service-Oriented PaaSAdvances in Service-Oriented and Cloud Computing

In their quest for elastic capacity that balances resource lease at the infrastructure level with quality of service at the top, SaaS providers have a hard time at mapping application requirements onto infrastructure performance indicators. The role of a pure service-oriented platform layer to that regard has not been completely investigated and still less exploited. In this paper we illustrate a case study in which we enabled elastic scalability within an existing SOA cloud platform prototype: PaaSSOA. The latter integration and its subsequent tests allowed us to demonstrate the potential benefits arising from exploiting SOA and PaaS capabilities together, especially to release SaaS providers from the burden of reserving infrastructure capacity to met SLAs and of managing web application