A Taxonomy and Survey of Cloud Resource Orchestration Techniques
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paper_title: Winds of Change: From Vendor Lock-In to the Meta Cloud

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The emergence of yet more cloud offerings from a multitude of service providers calls for a meta cloud to smoothen the edges of the jagged cloud landscape. This meta cloud could solve the vendor lock-in problems that current public and hybrid cloud users face.
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paper_title: Guest Editors' Introduction: Special Issue on Cloud Computing

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The articles in this special section focus on the topic of cloud computing, technologies, applications, and new areas of technological innovation.
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paper_title: CLOUD COMPUTING Methodology , Systems , and Applications

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Cloud computing has created a shift from the use of physical hardware and locally managed software-enabled platforms to that of virtualized cloud-hosted services. Cloud assembles large networks of virtual services, including hardware (CPU, storage, and network) and software resources (databases, message queuing systems, monitoring systems, and load-balancers). As Cloud continues to revolutionize applications in academia, industry, government, and many other fields, the transition to this efficient and flexible platform presents serious challenges at both theoretical and practical levelsones that will often require new approaches and practices in all areas. Comprehensive and timely, Cloud Computing: Methodology, Systems, and Applications summarizes progress in state-of-the-art research and offers step-by-step instruction on how to implement it. Summarizes Cloud Developments, Identifies Research Challenges, and Outlines Future Directions Ideal for a broad audience that includes researchers, engineers, IT professionals, and graduate students, this book is designed in three sections: Fundamentals of Cloud Computing: Concept, Methodology, and Overview Cloud Computing Functionalities and Provisioning Case Studies, Applications, and Future Directions It addresses the obvious technical aspects of using Cloud but goes beyond, exploring the cultural/social and regulatory/legal challenges that are quickly coming to the forefront of discussion. Properly applied as part of an overall IT strategy, Cloud can help small and medium business enterprises (SMEs) and governments in optimizing expenditure on application-hosting infrastructure. This material outlines a strategy for using Cloud to exploit opportunities in areas including, but not limited to, government, research, business, high-performance computing, web hosting, social networking, and multimedia. With contributions from a host of internationally recognized researchers, this reference delves into everything from necessary changes in users initial mindset to actual physical requirements for the successful integration of Cloud into existing in-house infrastructure. Using case studies throughout to reinforce concepts, this book also addresses recent advances and future directions in methodologies, taxonomies, IaaS/SaaS, data management and processing, programming models, and applications.
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paper_title: Rapid Prototyping of Multitier Cloud-Based Services and Systems

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With the authors' approach, developers build and deploy complex cloud-based applications according to the application's logical functional decomposition, using loosely coupled components that exploit cloud computing's advantages without the restrictions of a particular programming style or architecture.
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paper_title: CLOUD COMPUTING Methodology , Systems , and Applications

paper_content:

Cloud computing has created a shift from the use of physical hardware and locally managed software-enabled platforms to that of virtualized cloud-hosted services. Cloud assembles large networks of virtual services, including hardware (CPU, storage, and network) and software resources (databases, message queuing systems, monitoring systems, and load-balancers). As Cloud continues to revolutionize applications in academia, industry, government, and many other fields, the transition to this efficient and flexible platform presents serious challenges at both theoretical and practical levelsones that will often require new approaches and practices in all areas. Comprehensive and timely, Cloud Computing: Methodology, Systems, and Applications summarizes progress in state-of-the-art research and offers step-by-step instruction on how to implement it. Summarizes Cloud Developments, Identifies Research Challenges, and Outlines Future Directions Ideal for a broad audience that includes researchers, engineers, IT professionals, and graduate students, this book is designed in three sections: Fundamentals of Cloud Computing: Concept, Methodology, and Overview Cloud Computing Functionalities and Provisioning Case Studies, Applications, and Future Directions It addresses the obvious technical aspects of using Cloud but goes beyond, exploring the cultural/social and regulatory/legal challenges that are quickly coming to the forefront of discussion. Properly applied as part of an overall IT strategy, Cloud can help small and medium business enterprises (SMEs) and governments in optimizing expenditure on application-hosting infrastructure. This material outlines a strategy for using Cloud to exploit opportunities in areas including, but not limited to, government, research, business, high-performance computing, web hosting, social networking, and multimedia. With contributions from a host of internationally recognized researchers, this reference delves into everything from necessary changes in users initial mindset to actual physical requirements for the successful integration of Cloud into existing in-house infrastructure. Using case studies throughout to reinforce concepts, this book also addresses recent advances and future directions in methodologies, taxonomies, IaaS/SaaS, data management and processing, programming models, and applications.
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paper_title: A Taxonomy and Survey of Cloud Computing Systems

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The computational world is becoming very large and complex. Cloud Computing has emerged as a popular computing model to support processing large volumetric data using clusters of commodity computers. According to J.Dean and S. Ghemawat [1], Google currently processes over 20 terabytes of raw web data. It's some fascinating, large-scale processing of data that makes your head spin and appreciate the years of distributed computing fine-tuning applied to today's large problems. The evolution of cloud computing can handle such massive data as per on demand service. Nowadays the computational world is opting for pay-for-use models and Hype and discussion aside, there remains no concrete definition of cloud computing. In this paper, we first develop a comprehensive taxonomy for describing cloud computing architecture. Then we use this taxonomy to survey several existing cloud computing services developed by various projects world-wide such as Google, force.com, Amazon. We use the taxonomy and survey results not only to identify similarities and differences of the architectural approaches of cloud computing, but also to identify areas requiring further research.
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paper_title: Cloud4SOA: A Semantic-Interoperability PaaS Solution for Multi-cloud Platform Management and Portability

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Cloud Platform as a Service (PaaS) is a novel, rapidly growing segment in the Cloud computing market. However, the diversity and heterogeneity of today’s existing PaaS offerings raises several interoperability challenges. This introduces adoption barriers due to the lock-in issues that prevent the portability of data and applications from one PaaS to another, “locking” software developers to the first provider they use. This paper introduces the Cloud4SOA solution, a scalable approach to semantically interconnect heterogeneous PaaS offerings across different Cloud providers that share the same technology. The design of the Cloud4SOA solution, extensively presented in this work, comprises of a set of interlinked collaborating software components and models to provide developers and platform providers with a number of core capabilities: matchmaking, management, monitoring and migration of applications. The paper concludes with the presentation of a proof-of-concept implementation of the Cloud4SOA system based on real-life business scenarios.
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paper_title: An overview of the commercial cloud monitoring tools: research dimensions, design issues, and state-of-the-art

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Cloud monitoring activity involves dynamically tracking the Quality of Service (QoS) parameters related to virtualized resources (e.g., VM, storage, network, appliances, etc.), the physical resources they share, the applications running on them and data hosted on them. Applications and resources configuration in cloud computing environment is quite challenging considering a large number of heterogeneous cloud resources. Further, considering the fact that at each point of time, there will be a different and specific cloud service which may be massively required. Hence, cloud monitoring tools can assist a cloud providers or application developers in: (i) keeping their resources and applications operating at peak efficiency; (ii) detecting variations in resource and application performance; (iii) accounting the Service Level Agreement (SLA) violations of certain QoS parameters; and (iv) tracking the leave and join operations of cloud resources due to failures and other dynamic configuration changes. In this paper, we identify and discuss the major research dimensions and design issues related to engineering cloud monitoring tools. We further discuss how aforementioned research dimensions and design issues are handled by current academic research as well as by commercial monitoring tools.
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paper_title: Taxonomy of cloud computing services

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Cloud computing is a highly discussed topic, and many big players of the software industry are entering the development of cloud services. Several companies want to explore the possibilities and benefits of cloud computing, but with the amount of cloud computing services increasing quickly, the need for a taxonomy framework rises. This paper describes the available cloud computing services, and proposes a tree-structured taxonomy based on their characteristics, to easily classify cloud computing services making it easier to compare them.
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paper_title: Survey of Techniques and Architectures for Designing Energy-Efficient Data Centers

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Cloud computing has emerged as the leading paradigm for information technology businesses. Cloud computing provides a platform to manage and deliver computing services around the world over the Internet. Cloud services have helped businesses utilize computing services on demand with no upfront investments. The cloud computing paradigm has sustained its growth, which has led to increase in size and number of data centers. Data centers with thousands of computing devices are deployed as back end to provide cloud services. Computing devices are deployed redundantly in data centers to ensure 24/7 availability. However, many studies have pointed out that data centers consume large amount of electricity, thus calling for energy-efficiency measures. In this survey, we discuss research issues related to conflicting requirements of maximizing quality of services (QoSs) (availability, reliability, etc.) delivered by the cloud services while minimizing energy consumption of the data center resources. In this paper, we present the concept of inception of data center energy-efficiency controller that can consolidate data center resources with minimal effect on QoS requirements. We discuss software- and hardware-based techniques and architectures for data center resources such as server, memory, and network devices that can be manipulated by the data center controller to achieve energy efficiency.
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paper_title: An ontology-based system for Cloud infrastructure services' discovery

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The Cloud infrastructure services landscape advances steadily leaving users in the agony of choice. As a result, Cloud service identification and discovery remains a hard problem due to different service descriptions, non-standardised naming conventions and heterogeneous types and features of Cloud services. In this paper, we present an OWL-based ontology, the Cloud Computing Ontology (CoCoOn) that defines functional and non-functional concepts, attributes and relations of infrastructure services. We also present a system, CloudRecommender-that implements our domain ontology in a relational model. The system uses regular expressions and SQL for matching user requests to service descriptions. We briefly describe the architecture of the CloudRecommender system, and demonstrate its effectiveness and scalability through a service configuration selection experiment based on a set of prominent Cloud providers' descriptions including Amazon, Azure, and GoGrid.
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paper_title: QoS-Aware Autonomic Resource Management in Cloud Computing: A Systematic Review

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As computing infrastructure expands, resource management in a large, heterogeneous, and distributed environment becomes a challenging task. In a cloud environment, with uncertainty and dispersion of resources, one encounters problems of allocation of resources, which is caused by things such as heterogeneity, dynamism, and failures. Unfortunately, existing resource management techniques, frameworks, and mechanisms are insufficient to handle these environments, applications, and resource behaviors. To provide efficient performance of workloads and applications, the aforementioned characteristics should be addressed effectively. This research depicts a broad methodical literature analysis of autonomic resource management in the area of the cloud in general and QoS (Quality of Service)-aware autonomic resource management specifically. The current status of autonomic resource management in cloud computing is distributed into various categories. Methodical analysis of autonomic resource management in cloud computing and its techniques are described as developed by various industry and academic groups. Further, taxonomy of autonomic resource management in the cloud has been presented. This research work will help researchers find the important characteristics of autonomic resource management and will also help to select the most suitable technique for autonomic resource management in a specific application along with significant future research directions.
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paper_title: A survey and taxonomy on energy efficient resource allocation techniques for cloud computing systems

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In a cloud computing paradigm, energy efficient allocation of different virtualized ICT resources (servers, storage disks, and networks, and the like) is a complex problem due to the presence of heterogeneous application (e.g., content delivery networks, MapReduce, web applications, and the like) workloads having contentious allocation requirements in terms of ICT resource capacities (e.g., network bandwidth, processing speed, response time, etc.). Several recent papers have tried to address the issue of improving energy efficiency in allocating cloud resources to applications with varying degree of success. However, to the best of our knowledge there is no published literature on this subject that clearly articulates the research problem and provides research taxonomy for succinct classification of existing techniques. Hence, the main aim of this paper is to identify open challenges associated with energy efficient resource allocation. In this regard, the study, first, outlines the problem and existing hardware and software-based techniques available for this purpose. Furthermore, available techniques already presented in the literature are summarized based on the energy-efficient research dimension taxonomy. The advantages and disadvantages of the existing techniques are comprehensively analyzed against the proposed research dimension taxonomy namely: resource adaption policy, objective function, allocation method, allocation operation, and interoperability.
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paper_title: Towards a unified taxonomy and architecture of cloud frameworks

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Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) is one of the most important layers of Cloud Computing. However, there is an evident deficiency of mechanisms for analysis, comparison and evaluation of IaaS cloud implementations, since no unified taxonomy or reference architecture is available. In this article, we propose a unified taxonomy and an IaaS architectural framework. The taxonomy is structured around seven layers: core service layer, support layer, value-added services, control layer, management layer, security layer and resource abstraction. We survey various IaaS systems and map them onto our taxonomy to evaluate the classification. We then introduce an IaaS architectural framework that relies on the unified taxonomy. We provide a detailed description of each layer and define dependencies between the layers and components. Finally, we evaluate the proposed IaaS architectural framework on several real-world projects, while performing a comprehensive analysis of the most important commercial and open-source IaaS products. The evaluation results show notable distinction of feature support and capabilities between commercial and open-source IaaS platforms, significant deficiency of important architectural components in terms of fulfilling true promise of infrastructure clouds, and real-world usability of the proposed taxonomy and architectural framework.
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paper_title: NIST Cloud Computing Reference Architecture

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This paper presents the first version of the NIST Cloud Computing Reference Architecture (RA). This is a vendor neutral conceptual model that concentrates on the role and interactions of the identified actors in the cloud computing sphere. Five primary actors were identified - Cloud Service Consumer, Cloud Service Provider, Cloud Broker, Cloud Auditor and Cloud Carrier. Their roles and activities are discussed in this report. A primary goal for generating this model was to give the United States Government (USG) a method for understanding and communicating the components of a cloud computing system for Federal IT executives, Program Managers and IT procurement officials.
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paper_title: Interconnected Cloud Computing Environments: Challenges, Taxonomy, and Survey

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A brief review of the Internet history reveals the fact that the Internet evolved after the formation of primarily independent networks. Similarly, interconnected clouds, also called Inter-cloud, can be viewed as a natural evolution of cloud computing. Recent studies show the benefits in utilizing multiple clouds and present attempts for the realization of an Inter-cloud or federated cloud environment. However, cloud vendors have not taken into account cloud interoperability issues, and each cloud comes with its own solution and interfaces for services. This survey initially discusses all the relevant aspects motivating cloud interoperability. Furthermore, it categorizes and identifies possible cloud interoperability scenarios and architectures. The spectrum of challenges and obstacles that the Inter-cloud realization is faced with are covered, a taxonomy of them is provided, and fitting enablers that tackle each challenge are identified. All these aspects require a comprehensive review of the state of the art, including ongoing projects and studies in the area. We conclude by discussing future directions and trends toward the holistic approach in this regard.
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paper_title: Cloud Computing Resource Scheduling and a Survey of Its Evolutionary Approaches

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A disruptive technology fundamentally transforming the way that computing services are delivered, cloud computing offers information and communication technology users a new dimension of convenience of resources, as services via the Internet. Because cloud provides a finite pool of virtualized on-demand resources, optimally scheduling them has become an essential and rewarding topic, where a trend of using Evolutionary Computation (EC) algorithms is emerging rapidly. Through analyzing the cloud computing architecture, this survey first presents taxonomy at two levels of scheduling cloud resources. It then paints a landscape of the scheduling problem and solutions. According to the taxonomy, a comprehensive survey of state-of-the-art approaches is presented systematically. Looking forward, challenges and potential future research directions are investigated and invited, including real-time scheduling, adaptive dynamic scheduling, large-scale scheduling, multiobjective scheduling, and distributed and parallel scheduling. At the dawn of Industry 4.0, cloud computing scheduling for cyber-physical integration with the presence of big data is also discussed. Research in this area is only in its infancy, but with the rapid fusion of information and data technology, more exciting and agenda-setting topics are likely to emerge on the horizon.
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paper_title: A Taxonomy and Survey of Energy-Efficient Data Centers and Cloud Computing Systems

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Abstract Traditionally, the development of computing systems has been focused on performance improvements driven by the demand of applications from consumer, scientific, and business domains. However, the ever-increasing energy consumption of computing systems has started to limit further performance growth due to overwhelming electricity bills and carbon dioxide footprints. Therefore, the goal of the computer system design has been shifted to power and energy efficiency. To identify open challenges in the area and facilitate future advancements, it is essential to synthesize and classify the research on power- and energy-efficient design conducted to date. In this study, we discuss causes and problems of high power/energy consumption, and present a taxonomy of energy-efficient design of computing systems covering the hardware, operating system, virtualization, and data center levels. We survey various key works in the area and map them onto our taxonomy to guide future design and development efforts. This chapter concludes with a discussion on advancements identified in energy-efficient computing and our vision for future research directions.
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paper_title: Mastering VMware vSphere 5

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The 2013 edition of the bestselling vSphere book on the marketVirtualization remains the hottest trend in the IT world, and VMware vSphere is the industry's most widely deployed virtualization solution. The demand for IT professionals skilled in virtualization and cloud-related technologies is great and expected to keep growing. This comprehensive Sybex guide covers all the features and capabilities of VMware vSphere, showing administrators step by step how to install, configure, operate, manage, and secure it.This perfect blend of hands-on instruction, conceptual explanation, and practical application is reinforced with real-world examples. Led by Scott Lowe and Nick Marshall, both VMware vExperts, the author team provides expertise that will prepare IT professionals to excel in using this virtualization technology.Virtualization is seen as a "best practice" for high availability and disaster recovery solutions, as well as for applications such as Exchange Server and SharePointIDC estimates that there are as many as 7 million jobs available worldwide in virtualization and cloud technologyProvides hands-on instruction in all the latest features and capabilities of VMware vSphere, with both conceptual explanations and practical applicationsAuthor team is lead by Scott Lowe and Nick Marshall, well-known VMware experts and popular bloggersMastering VMware vSphere provides what every virtualization professional needs to know.
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paper_title: CLOUD COMPUTING Methodology , Systems , and Applications

paper_content:

Cloud computing has created a shift from the use of physical hardware and locally managed software-enabled platforms to that of virtualized cloud-hosted services. Cloud assembles large networks of virtual services, including hardware (CPU, storage, and network) and software resources (databases, message queuing systems, monitoring systems, and load-balancers). As Cloud continues to revolutionize applications in academia, industry, government, and many other fields, the transition to this efficient and flexible platform presents serious challenges at both theoretical and practical levelsones that will often require new approaches and practices in all areas. Comprehensive and timely, Cloud Computing: Methodology, Systems, and Applications summarizes progress in state-of-the-art research and offers step-by-step instruction on how to implement it. Summarizes Cloud Developments, Identifies Research Challenges, and Outlines Future Directions Ideal for a broad audience that includes researchers, engineers, IT professionals, and graduate students, this book is designed in three sections: Fundamentals of Cloud Computing: Concept, Methodology, and Overview Cloud Computing Functionalities and Provisioning Case Studies, Applications, and Future Directions It addresses the obvious technical aspects of using Cloud but goes beyond, exploring the cultural/social and regulatory/legal challenges that are quickly coming to the forefront of discussion. Properly applied as part of an overall IT strategy, Cloud can help small and medium business enterprises (SMEs) and governments in optimizing expenditure on application-hosting infrastructure. This material outlines a strategy for using Cloud to exploit opportunities in areas including, but not limited to, government, research, business, high-performance computing, web hosting, social networking, and multimedia. With contributions from a host of internationally recognized researchers, this reference delves into everything from necessary changes in users initial mindset to actual physical requirements for the successful integration of Cloud into existing in-house infrastructure. Using case studies throughout to reinforce concepts, this book also addresses recent advances and future directions in methodologies, taxonomies, IaaS/SaaS, data management and processing, programming models, and applications.
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paper_title: The entity-relationship model: toward a unified view of data

paper_content:

A data model, called the entity-relationship model, is proposed. This model incorporates some of the important semantic information about the real world. A special diagrammatic technique is introduced as a tool for database design. An example of database design and description using the model and the diagrammatic technique is given. Some implications for data integrity, information retrieval, and data manipulation are discussed. The entity-relationship model can be used as a basis for unification of different views of data: the network model, the relational model, and the entity set model. Semantic ambiguities in these models are analyzed. Possible ways to derive their views of data from the entity-relationship model are presented.
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paper_title: Cloud federation in a layered service model

paper_content:

We show how a layered Cloud service model of software (SaaS), platform (PaaS), and infrastructure (IaaS) leverages multiple independent Clouds by creating a federation among the providers. The layered architecture leads naturally to a design in which inter-Cloud federation takes place at each service layer, mediated by a broker specific to the concerns of the parties at that layer. Federation increases consumer value for and facilitates providing IT services as a commodity. This business model for the Cloud is consistent with broker mediated supply and service delivery chains in other commodity sectors such as finance and manufacturing. Concreteness is added to the federated Cloud model by considering how it works in delivering the Weather Research and Forecasting service (WRF) as SaaS using PaaS and IaaS support. WRF is used to illustrate the concepts of delegation and federation, the translation of service requirements between service layers, and inter-Cloud broker functions needed to achieve federation.
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paper_title: Interfaces for Placement, Migration, and Monitoring of Virtual Machines in Federated Clouds

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Current cloud computing infrastructure offerings are lacking in interoperability, which is a hindrance to the advancement and adoption of the cloud computing paradigm. As clouds are made interoperable, federations of clouds may be formed. Such federations are from the point of view of the user not burdened by vendor lock-in, and opens for business possibilities where a market place of cloud computing infrastructure can be formed. Federated clouds require unified management interfaces regarding the virtual machines (VMs) that comprise the services running in the cloud federation. Standardization efforts for the required management interfaces have so far focused on definition of description formats regarding VMs, and the control of already deployed VMs. We propose technology neutral interfaces and architectural additions for handling placement, migration, and monitoring of VMs in federated cloud environments, the latter as an extension of current monitoring architectures used in Grid computing. The interfaces presented adhere to the general requirements of scalability, efficiency, and security in addition to specific requirements related to the particular issues of interoperability and business relationships between competing cloud computing infrastructure providers. In addition, they may be used equally well locally and remotely, creating a layer of abstraction that simplifies management of virtualized service components.
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paper_title: Feature-Based Configuration of Vendor-Independent Deployments on IaaS

paper_content:

Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) is commonly used to deploy distributed systems like Web applications. For every component of a distributed system, IaaS consumers need to select, configure, and deploy a virtual machine (VM), the image to run on the VM, and software to install on the image. These tasks involve multiple decisions, require complex and error-prone manual effort, and may occur unexpectedly. To deal with these challenges, we present a feature-based configuration and vendor-independent deployment approach. An IaaS deployment model allows to describe and automatically perform the distributed system deployment vendor-independently. We use service feature modeling to support the decisions required for configuration. These modeling approaches are combined in a feature-based configuration and deployment process. It can be performed automatically and can be triggered in reaction to unexpected events. We present a proof-of-concept implementation that we use to perform a use case about deploying the Web application of the Barcoo service, showing the approach's applicability.
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paper_title: MODAClouds: a model-driven approach for the design and execution of applications on multiple clouds

paper_content:

Cloud computing is emerging as a major trend in the ICT industry. While most of the attention of the research community is focused on considering the perspective of the Cloud providers, offering mechanisms to support scaling of resources and interoperability and federation between Clouds, the perspective of developers and operators willing to choose the Cloud without being strictly bound to a specific solution is mostly neglected. We argue that Model-Driven Development can be helpful in this context as it would allow developers to design software systems in a cloud-agnostic way and to be supported by model transformation techniques into the process of instantiating the system into specific, possibly, multiple Clouds. The MODAClouds (MOdel-Driven Approach for the design and execution of applications on multiple Clouds) approach we present here is based on these principles and aims at supporting system developers and operators in exploiting multiple Clouds for the same system and in migrating (part of) their systems from Cloud to Cloud as needed. MODAClouds offers a quality-driven design, development and operation method and features a Decision Support System to enable risk analysis for the selection of Cloud providers and for the evaluation of the Cloud adoption impact on internal business processes. Furthermore, MODAClouds offers a run-time environment for observing the system under execution and for enabling a feedback loop with the design environment. This allows system developers to react to performance fluctuations and to re-deploy applications on different Clouds on the long term.
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paper_title: Nagios: System and Network Monitoring

paper_content:

Good system administrators recognize problems long before anyone asks, "Hey, is the Internet down?" Nagios, an open source system and network monitoring tool, has emerged as the most popular solution for sys admins in organizations of all sizes. It's robust but also complex, and Nagios: System and Network Monitoring, 2nd Edition, updated to address Nagios 3.0, will help you take full advantage of this program. Nagios, which runs on Linux and most *nix variants, can be configured to continuously monitor network services such as SMTP, POP3, HTTP, NNTP, SSH, and FTP. It can also supervise host resources (processor load, disk and memory usage, running processes, log files, and so on) and environmental factors, such as temperature and humidity. This book is your guide to getting the most out of this versatile and powerful monitoring tool. Inside Nagios, you'll learn how to:Install and configure the Nagios core, all standard plugins, and selected third-party plugins Configure the notification system to alert you of ongoing problems-and to alarm others in case of a serious crisis Program event handlers to take automatic action when trouble occurs Write Perl plugins to customize Nagios for your unique needs Quickly understand your Nagios data using graphing and visualization tools Monitor Windows servers, SAP systems, and Oracle databasesThe book also includes a chapter that highlights the differences between Nagios versions 2 and 3 and gives practical migration and compatibility tips. Nagios: System and Network Monitoring, 2nd Edition is a great starting point for configuring and using Nagios in your own environment. About the Author Wolfgang Barth has written several books for professional network administrators, including Firewall (Suse Press), Network Analysis (Suse Press), and Backup Solutions with Linux (Open Source Press). He is a professional system administrator with considerable experience using Nagios.
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paper_title: A Particle Swarm Optimization-Based Heuristic for Scheduling Workflow Applications in Cloud Computing Environments

paper_content:

Cloud computing environments facilitate applications by providing virtualized resources that can be provisioned dynamically. However, users are charged on a pay-per-use basis. User applications may incur large data retrieval and execution costs when they are scheduled taking into account only the ‘execution time’. In addition to optimizing execution time, the cost arising from data transfers between resources as well as execution costs must also be taken into account. In this paper, we present a particle swarm optimization (PSO) based heuristic to schedule applications to cloud resources that takes into account both computation cost and data transmission cost. We experiment with a workflow application by varying its computation and communication costs. We compare the cost savings when using PSO and existing ‘Best Resource Selection’ (BRS) algorithm. Our results show that PSO can achieve: a) as much as 3 times cost savings as compared to BRS, and b) good distribution of workload onto resources.
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paper_title: Stitch: A language for architecture-based self-adaptation

paper_content:

Requirements for high availability in computing systems today demand that systems be self-adaptive to maintain expected qualities-of-service in the presence of system faults, variable environmental conditions, and changing user requirements. Autonomic computing tackles the challenge of automating tasks that humans would otherwise have to perform to achieve this goal. However, existing approaches to autonomic computing lack the ability to capture routine human repair tasks in a way that takes into account the business context humans use in selecting an appropriate form of adaptation, while dealing with timing delays and uncertainties in outcome of repair actions. In this article, we present Stitch, a language for representing repair strategies within the context of an architecture-based self-adaptation framework. Stitch supports the explicit representation of repair decision trees together with the ability to express business objectives, allowing a self-adaptive system to select a strategy that has optimal utility in a given context, even in the presence of potential timing delays and outcome uncertainty.
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paper_title: ASAP: A Self-Adaptive Prediction System for Instant Cloud Resource Demand Provisioning

paper_content:

The promise of cloud computing is to provide computing resources instantly whenever they are needed. The state-of-art virtual machine (VM) provisioning technology can provision a VM in tens of minutes. This latency is unacceptable for jobs that need to scale out during computation. To truly enable on-the-fly scaling, new VM needs to be ready in seconds upon request. In this paper, We present an online temporal data mining system called ASAP, to model and predict the cloud VM demands. ASAP aims to extract high level characteristics from VM provisioning request stream and notify the provisioning system to prepare VMs in advance. For quantification issue, we propose Cloud Prediction Cost to encodes the cost and constraints of the cloud and guide the training of prediction algorithms. Moreover, we utilize a two-level ensemble method to capture the characteristics of the high transient demands time series. Experimental results using historical data from an IBM cloud in operation demonstrate that ASAP significantly improves the cloud service quality and provides possibility for on-the-fly provisioning.
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paper_title: URL: A Unified Reinforcement Learning Approach for Autonomic Cloud Management

paper_content:

Cloud computing is emerging as an increasingly important service-oriented computing paradigm. Management is a key to providing accurate service availability and performance data, as well as enabling real-time provisioning that automatically provides the capacity needed to meet service demands. In this paper, we present a unified reinforcement learning approach, namely URL, to automate the configuration processes of virtualized machines and appliances running in the virtual machines. The approach lends itself to the application of real-time autoconfiguration of clouds. It also makes it possible to adapt the VM resource budget and appliance parameter settings to the cloud dynamics and the changing workload to provide service quality assurance. In particular, the approach has the flexibility to make a good trade-off between system-wide utilization objectives and appliance-specific SLA optimization goals. Experimental results on Xen VMs with various workloads demonstrate the effectiveness of the approach. It can drive the system into an optimal or near-optimal configuration setting in a few trial-and-error iterations.
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paper_title: Profiling-Based Task Scheduling for Factory-Worker Applications in Infrastructure-as-a-Service Clouds

paper_content:

With the recent advances of cloud computing, effective resource usage (e.g., CPU, memory or network) becomes an important question as application developers have to continuously pay for rented resources, even if they are not used effectively. In order to maintain required performance levels, it is currently common to reserve resources for peak resource usage or possible resource usage overlaps, if more than one task is executed on a host. While this is a reasonable approach for long-running applications or web servers, for some applications with disperse resource usage over time, this strategy causes significant over-provisioning and thus resource wastage and financial loss. In this paper we present a profiling-based task scheduling approach for factory-worker applications that schedules tasks within the defined resource limitations (e.g., Existing machine memory size or network quota) and distributes the tasks in the cloud environment in order to use resources effectively. The evaluation of our approach approved the efficiency of the proposed algorithm and minimal performance overhead. In case of the evaluated application, the presented scheduling process leads up to 33% resource savings with only 1% of performance loss.
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paper_title: Adaptive Service Workflow Configuration and Agent-Based Virtual Resource Management in the Cloud*

paper_content:

Cloud computing represents a viable approach for hosting scalable applications and services. As business processes and scientific jobs become more intricate, users may have unbalanced and evolving requirements that are associated to the specific underlying sub-job or service. In this paper, we investigate the problem of managing virtual resources for service workflows in a cloud environment and propose an agent-based framework that makes resource management decisions that are customized to optimize different levels of the application. To facilitate the management process, we introduce and evaluate an adaptive workflow configuration algorithm to assign virtual machines to services (composed within a workflow) while aggregating virtual machines on appropriately-resourced physical machines. We use simulations of real-world networked cluster traces to evaluate and demonstrate the effectiveness of the algorithm.
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paper_title: SLA-driven predictive orchestration for distributed cloud-based mobile services

paper_content:

We describe a system for performing SLA-driven management and orchestration of distributed infrastructures composed of services supporting mobile computing use cases. In particular, we focus on a Follow-Me Cloud scenario in which we consider mobile users accessing cloud-enable services. We combine a SLA-driven approach to infrastructure optimization, with forecast-based performance degradation preventive actions and pattern detection for supporting mobile cloud infrastructure management. We present our system's information model and architecture including the algorithmic support and the proposed scenarios for system evaluation.
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paper_title: CloudGenius: A Hybrid Decision Support Method for Automating the Migration of Web Application Clusters to Public Clouds

paper_content:

With the increase in cloud service providers, and the increasing number of compute services offered, a migration of information systems to the cloud demands selecting the best mix of compute services and virtual machine (VM ) images from an abundance of possibilities. Therefore, a migration process for web applications has to automate evaluation and, in doing so, ensure that Quality of Service (QoS) requirements are met, while satisfying conflicting selection criteria like throughput and cost. When selecting compute services for multiple connected software components, web application engineers must consider heterogeneous sets of criteria and complex dependencies across multiple layers, which is impossible to resolve manually. The previously proposed CloudGenius framework has proven its capability to support migrations of single-component web applications. In this paper, we expand on the additional complexity of facilitating migration support for multi-component web applications. In particular, we present an evolutionary migration process for web application clusters distributed over multiple locations, and clearly identify the most important criteria relevant to the selection problem. Moreover, we present a multi-criteria-based selection algorithm based on Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP). Because the solution space grows exponentially, we developed a Genetic Algorithm (GA)-based approach to cope with computational complexities in a growing cloud market. Furthermore, a use case example proofs CloudGenius’ applicability. To conduct experiments, we implemented CumulusGenius, a prototype of the selection algorithm and the GA deployable on hadoop clusters. Experiments with CumulusGenius give insights on time complexities and the quality of the GA.
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paper_title: Energy-Aware Resource Allocation Heuristics for Efficient Management of Data Centers for Cloud Computing

paper_content:

Cloud computing offers utility-oriented IT services to users worldwide. Based on a pay-as-you-go model, it enables hosting of pervasive applications from consumer, scientific, and business domains. However, data centers hosting Cloud applications consume huge amounts of electrical energy, contributing to high operational costs and carbon footprints to the environment. Therefore, we need Green Cloud computing solutions that can not only minimize operational costs but also reduce the environmental impact. In this paper, we define an architectural framework and principles for energy-efficient Cloud computing. Based on this architecture, we present our vision, open research challenges, and resource provisioning and allocation algorithms for energy-efficient management of Cloud computing environments. The proposed energy-aware allocation heuristics provision data center resources to client applications in a way that improves energy efficiency of the data center, while delivering the negotiated Quality of Service (QoS). In particular, in this paper we conduct a survey of research in energy-efficient computing and propose: (a) architectural principles for energy-efficient management of Clouds; (b) energy-efficient resource allocation policies and scheduling algorithms considering QoS expectations and power usage characteristics of the devices; and (c) a number of open research challenges, addressing which can bring substantial benefits to both resource providers and consumers. We have validated our approach by conducting a performance evaluation study using the CloudSim toolkit. The results demonstrate that Cloud computing model has immense potential as it offers significant cost savings and demonstrates high potential for the improvement of energy efficiency under dynamic workload scenarios.
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paper_title: Modeling Next Generation Configuration Management Tools

paper_content:

There are several current theoretical models used to discuss configuration management, including aspects, closures, and promises. We examine how these models relate to one another, and develop a overall theoretical framework within which to discuss configuration management solutions. We apply this framework to classify the capabilities of current tools, and develop requirements for the next generation of configuration management tools.
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paper_title: Promises, Impositions, and other Directionals

paper_content:

Promises, impositions, proposals, predictions, and suggestions are categorized as voluntary co-operational methods. The class of voluntary co-operational methods is included in the class of so-called directionals. Directionals are mechanisms supporting the mutual coordination of autonomous agents. ::: Notations are provided capable of expressing residual fragments of directionals. An extensive example, involving promises about the suitability of programs for tasks imposed on the promisee is presented. The example illustrates the dynamics of promises and more specifically the corresponding mechanism of trust updating and credibility updating. Trust levels and credibility levels then determine the way certain promises and impositions are handled. ::: The ubiquity of promises and impositions is further demonstrated with two extensive examples involving human behaviour: an artificial example about an agent planning a purchase, and a realistic example describing technology mediated interaction concerning the solution of pay station failure related problems arising for an agent intending to leave the parking area.
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paper_title: QoS-Aware Autonomic Resource Management in Cloud Computing: A Systematic Review

paper_content:

As computing infrastructure expands, resource management in a large, heterogeneous, and distributed environment becomes a challenging task. In a cloud environment, with uncertainty and dispersion of resources, one encounters problems of allocation of resources, which is caused by things such as heterogeneity, dynamism, and failures. Unfortunately, existing resource management techniques, frameworks, and mechanisms are insufficient to handle these environments, applications, and resource behaviors. To provide efficient performance of workloads and applications, the aforementioned characteristics should be addressed effectively. This research depicts a broad methodical literature analysis of autonomic resource management in the area of the cloud in general and QoS (Quality of Service)-aware autonomic resource management specifically. The current status of autonomic resource management in cloud computing is distributed into various categories. Methodical analysis of autonomic resource management in cloud computing and its techniques are described as developed by various industry and academic groups. Further, taxonomy of autonomic resource management in the cloud has been presented. This research work will help researchers find the important characteristics of autonomic resource management and will also help to select the most suitable technique for autonomic resource management in a specific application along with significant future research directions.
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paper_title: Long-Term QoS-Aware Cloud Service Composition Using Multivariate Time Series Analysis

paper_content:

We propose a cloud service composition framework that selects the optimal composition based on an end user's long-term Quality of Service (QoS) requirements. In a typical cloud environment, existing solutions are not suitable when service providers fail to provide the long-term QoS provision advertisements. The proposed framework uses a new multivariate QoS analysis to predict the long-term QoS provisions from service providers’ historical QoS data and short-term advertisements represented using Time Series . The quality of the QoS prediction is improved by incorporating QoS attributes’ intra correlations into the multivariate analysis. To select the optimal service composition, the proposed framework uses QoS time series’ inter correlations and performs a novel time series group similarity approach on the predicted QoS values. Experiments are conducted on real QoS dataset and results prove the efficiency of the proposed approach.
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paper_title: Software architecture definition for on-demand cloud provisioning

paper_content:

Cloud computing [23] is a promising paradigm for the provisioning of IT services. Cloud computing infrastructures, such as those offered by the RESERVOIR project, aim to facilitate the deployment, management and execution of services across multiple physical locations in a seamless manner. In order for service providers to meet their quality of service objectives, it is important to examine how software architectures can be described to take full advantage of the capabilities introduced by such platforms. When dealing with software systems involving numerous loosely coupled components, architectural constraints need to be made explicit to ensure continuous operation when allocating and migrating services from one host in the Cloud to another. In addition, the need for optimising resources and minimising over-provisioning requires service providers to control the dynamic adjustment of capacity throughout the entire service lifecycle. We discuss the implications for software architecture definitions of distributed applications that are to be deployed on Clouds. In particular, we identify novel primitives to support service elasticity, co-location and other requirements, propose language abstractions for these primitives and define their behavioural semantics precisely by establishing constraints on the relationship between architecture definitions and Cloud management infrastructures using a model denotational approach in order to derive appropriate service management cycles.
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paper_title: Knowledge Management and Promises

paper_content:

Ontological modelling for machine inference has featured prominently in IT management research recently, but there is more immediate scope for knowledge modelling in the realm of human inference. This work discusses the relationship between ISO Standard Topic Maps and Promise Theory and shows how these two knowledge models models complement one another and offer a semantic approach to policy based management that can reduce organizational information complexity.
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paper_title: Autonomic computing: An overview

paper_content:

The increasing scale complexity, heterogeneity and dynamism of networks, systems and applications have made our computational and information infrastructure brittle, unmanageable and insecure. This has necessitated the investigation of an alternate paradigm for system and application design, which is based on strategies used by biological systems to deal with similar challenges – a vision that has been referred to as autonomic computing. The overarching goal of autonomic computing is to realize computer and software systems and applications that can manage themselves in accordance with high-level guidance from humans. Meeting the grand challenges of autonomic computing requires scientific and technological advances in a wide variety of fields, as well as new software and system architectures that support the effective integration of the constituent technologies. This paper presents an introduction to autonomic computing, its challenges, and opportunities.
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paper_title: Seeking Closure in an Open World: A Behavioral Agent Approach to Configuration Management

paper_content:

We present a new model of configuration management based upon a hierarchy of simple communicating autonomous agents. Each of these agents is responsible for a "closure": a domain of "semantic predictability" in which declarative commands to the agent have a simple, persistent, portable, and documented effect upon subsequent observable behavior. Closures are built bottom-up to form a management hierarchy based upon the pre-existing dependencies between subsystems in a complex system. Closure agents decompose configuration management via a modularity of effect and behavior that promises to eventually lead to self-organizing systems driven entirely by behavioral specifications, where a system's configuration is free of details that have no observable effect upon system.
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paper_title: SPEEDL - A Declarative Event-Based Language to Define the Scaling Behavior of Cloud Applications

paper_content:

Contemporary cloud providers offer out-of-the-box auto-scaling solutions. However, defining a non-trivial scaling behavior that goes beyond the feature set provided by existing solutions is still challenging. In this paper we present SPEEDL, a declarative and extensible domain-specific language that simplifies the creation of elastic scaling behavior on top of IaaS clouds. SPEEDL simplifies the creation of event-driven policies for resource management (How many resources, and what resource types, are needed?), as well as task mapping (Which tasks should be handled by which resources?). Based on a dataset of real-life scaling policies, we demonstrate that SPEEDL can cover most scaling behaviors real-life developers want to express, and that the resulting SPEEDL policies are at the same time substantially more compact, easier to read, and less error-prone than the same behavior expressed via a general-purpose programming language.
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paper_title: Empirical prediction models for adaptive resource provisioning in the cloud

paper_content:

Cloud computing allows dynamic resource scaling for enterprise online transaction systems, one of the key characteristics that differentiates the cloud from the traditional computing paradigm. However, initializing a new virtual instance in a cloud is not instantaneous; cloud hosting platforms introduce several minutes delay in the hardware resource allocation. In this paper, we develop prediction-based resource measurement and provisioning strategies using Neural Network and Linear Regression to satisfy upcoming resource demands. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed technique offers more adaptive resource management for applications hosted in the cloud environment, an important mechanism to achieve on-demand resource allocation in the cloud.
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paper_title: Investigating Decision Support Techniques for Automating Cloud Service Selection

paper_content:

The compass of Cloud infrastructure services advances steadily leaving users in the agony of choice. To be able to select the best mix of service offering from an abundance of possibilities, users must consider complex dependencies and heterogeneous sets of criteria. Therefore, we present a PhD thesis proposal on investigating an intelligent decision support system for selecting Cloud-based infrastructure services (e.g. storage, network, CPU). The outcomes of this will be decision support tools and techniques, which will automate and map users' specified application requirements to Cloud service configurations.
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paper_title: An online fuzzy Decision Support System for Resource Management in cloud environments

paper_content:

Cloud computing is a large-scale distributed computing paradigm driven by economies of scale, in which a pool of abstracted, virtualized, dynamically-scalable, managed computing power, storage, platforms, and services are delivered on demand to external customers over the Internet. Although a significant amount of studies have been developed to optimize resource management and task scheduling in cloud computing, none of them considered the impact of task scheduling patterns on resource management and vice versa. To overcome this drawback, and considering the lack of resources in cloud environments and growing customer demands for cloud services, this paper proposes an Online Resource Management Decision Support System (ORMDSS) that addresses both tasks scheduling and resource management optimization in a unique system. In addition, ORMDSS contains a fuzzy prediction method for predicting VM workload patterns and VM migration time by applying neural networks and fuzzy expert systems. This ORMDSS helps cloud providers to automatically allocate scare resources to the applications and services in an optimal way. It is expected that the ORMDSS not only increases cloud utilization and QoS, but also decreases cost and response time.
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paper_title: RPPS: A Novel Resource Prediction and Provisioning Scheme in Cloud Data Center

paper_content:

Cloud data centers and virtualization are being highly considered for enterprises and industries. However, elastic fine-grained resource provision while ensuring performance and SLA guarantees for applications requires careful consideration of important and extremely challenging tradeoffs. In this paper, we present RPPS (Cloud Resource Prediction and Provisioning scheme), a scheme that automatically predict future demand and perform proactive resource provisioning for cloud applications. RPPS employs the ARIMA model to predict the workloads in the future, combines both coarse-grained and fine-grained resource scaling under different situations, and adopts a VM-complementary migration strategy. RPPS can resolve predictive resource provisioning problem when enterprises confront demand fluctuations in cloud data center. We evaluate a prototype of RPPS with traces collected by ourselves using typical CPU intensive applications and as well as workloads from a real data center. The results show that it not only has high prediction accuracy (about 90% match in most time) but also scales the resource well.
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paper_title: Interconnected Cloud Computing Environments: Challenges, Taxonomy, and Survey

paper_content:

A brief review of the Internet history reveals the fact that the Internet evolved after the formation of primarily independent networks. Similarly, interconnected clouds, also called Inter-cloud, can be viewed as a natural evolution of cloud computing. Recent studies show the benefits in utilizing multiple clouds and present attempts for the realization of an Inter-cloud or federated cloud environment. However, cloud vendors have not taken into account cloud interoperability issues, and each cloud comes with its own solution and interfaces for services. This survey initially discusses all the relevant aspects motivating cloud interoperability. Furthermore, it categorizes and identifies possible cloud interoperability scenarios and architectures. The spectrum of challenges and obstacles that the Inter-cloud realization is faced with are covered, a taxonomy of them is provided, and fitting enablers that tackle each challenge are identified. All these aspects require a comprehensive review of the state of the art, including ongoing projects and studies in the area. We conclude by discussing future directions and trends toward the holistic approach in this regard.
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paper_title: Cloud Computing Resource Scheduling and a Survey of Its Evolutionary Approaches

paper_content:

A disruptive technology fundamentally transforming the way that computing services are delivered, cloud computing offers information and communication technology users a new dimension of convenience of resources, as services via the Internet. Because cloud provides a finite pool of virtualized on-demand resources, optimally scheduling them has become an essential and rewarding topic, where a trend of using Evolutionary Computation (EC) algorithms is emerging rapidly. Through analyzing the cloud computing architecture, this survey first presents taxonomy at two levels of scheduling cloud resources. It then paints a landscape of the scheduling problem and solutions. According to the taxonomy, a comprehensive survey of state-of-the-art approaches is presented systematically. Looking forward, challenges and potential future research directions are investigated and invited, including real-time scheduling, adaptive dynamic scheduling, large-scale scheduling, multiobjective scheduling, and distributed and parallel scheduling. At the dawn of Industry 4.0, cloud computing scheduling for cyber-physical integration with the presence of big data is also discussed. Research in this area is only in its infancy, but with the rapid fusion of information and data technology, more exciting and agenda-setting topics are likely to emerge on the horizon.
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paper_title: Declarative automated cloud resource orchestration

paper_content:

As cloud computing becomes widely deployed, one of the challenges faced involves the ability to orchestrate a highly complex set of subsystems (compute, storage, network resources) that span large geographic areas serving diverse clients. To ease this process, we present COPE (Cloud Orchestration Policy Engine), a distributed platform that allows cloud providers to perform declarative automated cloud resource orchestration. In COPE, cloud providers specify system-wide constraints and goals using COPElog, a declarative policy language geared towards specifying distributed constraint optimizations. COPE takes policy specifications and cloud system states as input and then optimizes compute, storage and network resource allocations within the cloud such that provider operational objectives and customer SLAs can be better met. We describe our proposed integration with a cloud orchestration platform, and present initial evaluation results that demonstrate the viability of COPE using production traces from a large hosting company in the US. We further discuss an orchestration scenario that involves geographically distributed data centers, and conclude with an ongoing status of our work.
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paper_title: Adaptive resource provisioning for read intensive multi-tier applications in the cloud

paper_content:

A Service-Level Agreement (SLA) provides surety for specific quality attributes to the consumers of services. However, current SLAs offered by cloud infrastructure providers do not address response time, which, from the user's point of view, is the most important quality attribute for Web applications. Satisfying a maximum average response time guarantee for Web applications is difficult for two main reasons: first, traffic patterns are highly dynamic and difficult to predict accurately; second, the complex nature of multi-tier Web applications increases the difficulty of identifying bottlenecks and resolving them automatically. This paper proposes a methodology and presents a working prototype system for automatic detection and resolution of bottlenecks in a multi-tier Web application hosted on a cloud in order to satisfy specific maximum response time requirements. It also proposes a method for identifying and retracting over-provisioned resources in multi-tier cloud-hosted Web applications. We demonstrate the feasibility of the approach in an experimental evaluation with a testbed EUCALYPTUS-based cloud and a synthetic workload. Automatic bottleneck detection and resolution under dynamic resource management has the potential to enable cloud infrastructure providers to provide SLAs for Web applications that guarantee specific response time requirements while minimizing resource utilization.
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paper_title: Context Awareness as a Service for Cloud Resource Optimization

paper_content:

Cloud computing architectures involve different actors that can be divided into four categories: infrastructure- and platform-as-a-service providers, PaaS clients, and end users. These actors establish contracts with each other, with the intention of optimizing their costs and offering quality service. Paying attention to end users' context and providing context awareness as a service at the PaaS provider level offers several benefits, including that it lets PaaS clients develop multimodal services and thus optimize infrastructure use. In this article, the authors describe how to include context awareness in cloud infrastructure and the impact it could have at each actor's level.
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paper_title: CometCloud: An Autonomic Cloud Engine

paper_content:

Clouds typically have highly dynamic demands for resources with highly heterogeneous and dynamic workloads. For example, the workloads associated with the application can be quite dynamic, both in terms of the number of tasks processed as well as computation requirements of each task. Furthermore, different applications may have very different and dynamic QoS requirements, for example, one application may require high throughput while another may be constrained by a budget, and a third may have to balance both throughput and budget. The performance of a cloud service can also vary based on these varying loads as well as failures, network conditions, etc., resulting in different quality of service to the application. Combining public cloud platforms and integrating them with existing grids and data centers can support on-demand scale-up, scale-down as well as scale-out. Users may want to use resources in their private cloud (or datacenter or grid) first before scaling out onto a public cloud, and may have preference for a particular cloud or may want to combine multiple clouds. However, such integration and interoperability is currently non-trivial. Furthermore, integrating these public cloud platforms with exiting
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paper_title: Solution-based deployment of complex application services on a Cloud

paper_content:

Managing and containing runaway IT costs for solution deployment is one of the top priorities for enterprises. Cloud Computing, with its on-demand provisioning capability on shared resources, has emerged as a new paradigm for reducing IT costs. In this paper, we describe a solution-based provisioning mechanism to automate the deployment of complex application services on a Cloud infrastructure. We introduce the concept of Composite Appliance and show how it can be used to deploy a complete solution and to simplify management tasks. We illustrate the advantages of our approach with a prototype solution consisting of two-tier application services that are deployed and configured automatically on virtual machine instances without manual intervention.
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paper_title: Programming Paradigms for Dummies: What Every Programmer Should Know

paper_content:

This chapter gives an introduction to all the main programming paradigms, their underlying concepts, and the relationships between them. We give a broad view to help programmers choose the right concepts they need to solve the problems at hand. We give a taxonomy of almost 30 useful programming paradigms and how they are related. Most of them differ only in one or a few concepts, but this can make a world of difference in programming. We explain briefly how programming paradigms influence language design, and we show two sweet spots: dual-paradigm languages and a definitive language. We introduce the main concepts of programming languages: records, closures, independence (concurrency), and named state. We explain the main principles of data abstraction and how it lets us organize large programs. Finally, we conclude by focusing on concurrency, which is widely considered the hardest concept to program with. We present four little-known but important paradigms that greatly simplify concurrent programming with respect to mainstream languages: declarative concurrency (both eager and lazy), functional reactive programming, discrete synchronous programming, and constraint programming. These paradigms have no race conditions and can be used in cases where no other paradigm works. We explain why for multi-core processors and we give several examples from computer music, which often uses these paradigms.
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paper_title: Guest Editors' Introduction: Special Issue on Cloud Computing

paper_content:

The articles in this special section focus on the topic of cloud computing, technologies, applications, and new areas of technological innovation.
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paper_title: Using Constraint Programming to Manage Configurations in Self-Adaptive Systems

paper_content:

Combining goal-modeling techniques with constraint programming provides the means to identify the variants best suited to the environmental contexts that a self-adaptive software system might encounter at runtime.
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paper_title: Distributed application configuration, management, and visualization with plush

paper_content:

Support for distributed application management in large-scale networked environments remains in its early stages. Although a number of solutions exist for subtasks of application deployment, monitoring, and maintenance in distributed environments, few tools provide a unified framework for application management. Many of the existing tools address the management needs of a single type of application or service that runs in a specific environment, and these tools are not adaptable enough to be used for other applications or platforms. To this end, we present the design and implementation of Plush, a fully configurable application management infrastructure designed to meet the general requirements of several different classes of distributed applications. Plush allows developers to specifically define the flow of control needed by their computations using application building blocks. Through an extensible resource management interface, Plush supports execution in a variety of environments, including both live deployment platforms and emulated clusters. Plush also uses relaxed synchronization primitives for improving fault tolerance and liveness in failure-prone environments. To gain an understanding of how Plush manages different classes of distributed applications, we take a closer look at specific applications and evaluate how Plush provides support for each.
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paper_title: Declarative automated cloud resource orchestration

paper_content:

As cloud computing becomes widely deployed, one of the challenges faced involves the ability to orchestrate a highly complex set of subsystems (compute, storage, network resources) that span large geographic areas serving diverse clients. To ease this process, we present COPE (Cloud Orchestration Policy Engine), a distributed platform that allows cloud providers to perform declarative automated cloud resource orchestration. In COPE, cloud providers specify system-wide constraints and goals using COPElog, a declarative policy language geared towards specifying distributed constraint optimizations. COPE takes policy specifications and cloud system states as input and then optimizes compute, storage and network resource allocations within the cloud such that provider operational objectives and customer SLAs can be better met. We describe our proposed integration with a cloud orchestration platform, and present initial evaluation results that demonstrate the viability of COPE using production traces from a large hosting company in the US. We further discuss an orchestration scenario that involves geographically distributed data centers, and conclude with an ongoing status of our work.
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paper_title: Cloud Resource Orchestration: A Data-Centric Approach

paper_content:

Cloud computing provides users near instant access to seemingly unlimited resources, and provides service providers the opportunity to deploy complex information technology infrastructure, as a service, to their customers. Providers bene t from economies of scale and multiplexing gains a orded by sharing of resources through virtualization of the underlying physical infrastructure. However, the scale and highly dynamic nature of cloud platforms impose signi cant new challenges to cloud service providers. In particular, realizing sophisticated cloud services requires a cloud control framework that can orchestrate cloud resource provisioning, con guration, utilization and decommissioning across a distributed set of physical resources. In this paper we advocate a data-centric approach to cloud orchestration. Following this approach, cloud resources are modeled as structured data that can be queried by a declarative language, and updated with well-de ned transactional semantics. We examine the feasibility, bene ts and challenges of the approach, and present our design and prototype implementation of the Data-centric Management Framework (DMF) as a solution, with data models, query languages and semantics that are speci cally designed for cloud resource orchestration.
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paper_title: Software architecture definition for on-demand cloud provisioning

paper_content:

Cloud computing [23] is a promising paradigm for the provisioning of IT services. Cloud computing infrastructures, such as those offered by the RESERVOIR project, aim to facilitate the deployment, management and execution of services across multiple physical locations in a seamless manner. In order for service providers to meet their quality of service objectives, it is important to examine how software architectures can be described to take full advantage of the capabilities introduced by such platforms. When dealing with software systems involving numerous loosely coupled components, architectural constraints need to be made explicit to ensure continuous operation when allocating and migrating services from one host in the Cloud to another. In addition, the need for optimising resources and minimising over-provisioning requires service providers to control the dynamic adjustment of capacity throughout the entire service lifecycle. We discuss the implications for software architecture definitions of distributed applications that are to be deployed on Clouds. In particular, we identify novel primitives to support service elasticity, co-location and other requirements, propose language abstractions for these primitives and define their behavioural semantics precisely by establishing constraints on the relationship between architecture definitions and Cloud management infrastructures using a model denotational approach in order to derive appropriate service management cycles.
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paper_title: Enforcing Performance Isolation Across Virtual Machines in Xen

paper_content:

Virtual machines (VMs) have recently emerged as the basis for allocating resources in enterprise settings and hosting centers. One benefit of VMs in these environments is the ability to multiplex several operating systems on hardware based on dynamically changing system characteristics. However, such multiplexing must often be done while observing per-VM performance guarantees or service level agreements. Thus, one important requirement in this environment is effective performance isolation among VMs. In this paper, we address performance isolation across virtual machines in Xen [1]. For instance, while Xen can allocate fixed shares of CPU among competing VMs, it does not currently account for work done on behalf of individual VMs in device drivers. Thus, the behavior of one VM can negatively impact resources available to other VMs even if appropriate per-VM resource limits are in place. ::: ::: In this paper, we present the design and evaluation of a set of primitives implemented in Xen to address this issue. First, XenMon accurately measures per-VM resource consumption, including work done on behalf of a particular VM in Xen's driver domains. Next, our SEDF-DC scheduler accounts for aggregate VM resource consumption in allocating CPU. Finally, ShareGuard limits the total amount of resources consumed in privileged and driver domains based on administrator-specified limits. Our performance evaluation indicates that our mechanisms effectively enforce performance isolation for a variety of workloads and configurations.
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paper_title: Inter-Cloud Architectures and Application Brokering: Taxonomy and Survey

paper_content:

Although Cloud computing itself has many open problems, researchers in the field have already made the leap to envision Inter-Cloud computing. Their goal is to achieve better overall Quality of Service QoS, reliability and cost efficiency by utilizing multiple clouds. Inter-Cloud research is still in its infancy, and the body of knowledge in the area has not been well defined yet. In this work, we propose and motivate taxonomies for Inter-Cloud architectures and application brokering mechanisms. We present a detailed survey of the state of the art in terms of both academic and industry developments 20 projects, and we fit each project onto the discussed taxonomies. We discuss how the current Inter-Cloud environments facilitate brokering of distributed applications across clouds considering their nonfunctional requirements. Finally, we analyse the existing works and identify open challenges and trends in the area of Inter-Cloud application brokering. Copyright © 2012 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.
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paper_title: Cloudward bound: planning for beneficial migration of enterprise applications to the cloud

paper_content:

In this paper, we tackle challenges in migrating enterprise services into hybrid cloud-based deployments, where enterprise operations are partly hosted on-premise and partly in the cloud. Such hybrid architectures enable enterprises to benefit from cloud-based architectures, while honoring application performance requirements, and privacy restrictions on what services may be migrated to the cloud. We make several contributions. First, we highlight the complexity inherent in enterprise applications today in terms of their multi-tiered nature, large number of application components, and interdependencies. Second, we have developed a model to explore the benefits of a hybrid migration approach. Our model takes into account enterprise-specific constraints, cost savings, and increased transaction delays and wide-area communication costs that may result from the migration. Evaluations based on real enterprise applications and Azure-based cloud deployments show the benefits of a hybrid migration approach, and the importance of planning which components to migrate. Third, we shed insight on security policies associated with enterprise applications in data centers. We articulate the importance of ensuring assurable reconfiguration of security policies as enterprise applications are migrated to the cloud. We present algorithms to achieve this goal, and demonstrate their efficacy on realistic migration scenarios.
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paper_title: Mastering VMware vSphere 5

paper_content:

The 2013 edition of the bestselling vSphere book on the marketVirtualization remains the hottest trend in the IT world, and VMware vSphere is the industry's most widely deployed virtualization solution. The demand for IT professionals skilled in virtualization and cloud-related technologies is great and expected to keep growing. This comprehensive Sybex guide covers all the features and capabilities of VMware vSphere, showing administrators step by step how to install, configure, operate, manage, and secure it.This perfect blend of hands-on instruction, conceptual explanation, and practical application is reinforced with real-world examples. Led by Scott Lowe and Nick Marshall, both VMware vExperts, the author team provides expertise that will prepare IT professionals to excel in using this virtualization technology.Virtualization is seen as a "best practice" for high availability and disaster recovery solutions, as well as for applications such as Exchange Server and SharePointIDC estimates that there are as many as 7 million jobs available worldwide in virtualization and cloud technologyProvides hands-on instruction in all the latest features and capabilities of VMware vSphere, with both conceptual explanations and practical applicationsAuthor team is lead by Scott Lowe and Nick Marshall, well-known VMware experts and popular bloggersMastering VMware vSphere provides what every virtualization professional needs to know.
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paper_title: Learning Ansible

paper_content:

Use Ansible to configure your systems, deploy software, and orchestrate advanced IT tasks About This BookUse Ansible to automate your infrastructure effectively, with minimal effortCustomize and consolidate your configuration management tools with the secure and highly-reliable features of AnsibleUnleash the abilities of Ansible and extend the functionality of your mainframe system through the use of powerful, real-world examplesWho This Book Is ForIf you want to learn how to use Ansible to automate an infrastructure, either from scratch or to augment your current tooling with Ansible, then this is the book for you. It has plenty of practical examples to help you get to grips with Ansible. In Detail Automation includes provisioning new servers, making sure the servers adhere to their role and maintain the desired state from a configuration perspective, and orchestrating various actions across environments and deploying code as expected to all these servers. This is where Ansible steps in. It is secure, highly reliable, and minimalistic in nature. It automates configuration management, application deployment, and many other IT needs.Learning Ansible will equip you with the necessary skills to automate/improve your infrastructure from a configuration management perspective. You will also be able to use Ansible for one-click deployments, provisioning, and orchestrating your infrastructure.
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paper_title: Towards an architecture for deploying elastic services in the cloud

paper_content:

Cloud computing infrastructure services enable the flexible creation of virtual infrastructures on-demand. However, the creation of infrastructures is only a part of the process for provisioning services. Other steps such as installation, deployment, configuration, monitoring and management of software components are needed to fully provide services to end-users in the cloud. This paper describes a peer-to-peer architecture to automatically deploy services on cloud infrastructures. The architecture uses a component repository to manage the deployment of these software components, enabling elasticity by using the underlying cloud infrastructure provider. The life cycle of these components is described in this paper, as well as the language for defining them. We also describe the open-source proof-of-concept implementation. Some technical information about this implementation together with some statistical results are also provided. Copyright © 2011 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.
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paper_title: Consuming Resources and Services from Multiple Clouds

paper_content:

The consumption of resources and services from multiple Clouds for reasons like high availability, cost reductions or special features is a natural evolution from in-silo Clouds. Several middleware are already available for multiple Clouds. However, due to the complexity of the technical solutions, their approaches are quite different and a classification is needed to guide the potential users. This paper looks to the reports on multiple Cloud topics and proposes a specific taxonomy. It identifies the ready-to-use software and services and classifies them according the taxonomy. It also underlines the driving needs and requirements from consumers' and providers' point of views. A particular Cloudware is provided as an example for the degree of requirements fulfillment.
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paper_title: A static theory of promises

paper_content:

We discuss for the concept of promises within a framework that can be applied to either humans or technology. We compare promises to the more established notion of obligations and find promises to be both simpler and more effective at reducing uncertainty in behavioural outcomes.
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paper_title: Interconnected Cloud Computing Environments: Challenges, Taxonomy, and Survey

paper_content:

A brief review of the Internet history reveals the fact that the Internet evolved after the formation of primarily independent networks. Similarly, interconnected clouds, also called Inter-cloud, can be viewed as a natural evolution of cloud computing. Recent studies show the benefits in utilizing multiple clouds and present attempts for the realization of an Inter-cloud or federated cloud environment. However, cloud vendors have not taken into account cloud interoperability issues, and each cloud comes with its own solution and interfaces for services. This survey initially discusses all the relevant aspects motivating cloud interoperability. Furthermore, it categorizes and identifies possible cloud interoperability scenarios and architectures. The spectrum of challenges and obstacles that the Inter-cloud realization is faced with are covered, a taxonomy of them is provided, and fitting enablers that tackle each challenge are identified. All these aspects require a comprehensive review of the state of the art, including ongoing projects and studies in the area. We conclude by discussing future directions and trends toward the holistic approach in this regard.
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paper_title: A Declarative Recommender System for Cloud Infrastructure Services Selection

paper_content:

The cloud infrastructure services landscape advances steadily leaving users in the agony of choice. Therefore, we present CloudRecommender, a new declarative approach for selecting Cloud-based infrastructure services. CloudRecommender automates the mapping of users' specified application requirements to cloud service configurations. We formally capture cloud service configurations in ontology and provide its implementation in a structured data model which can be manipulated through both regular expressions and SQL. By exploiting the power of a visual programming language (widgets), CloudRecommender further enables simplified and intuitive cloud service selection. We describe the design and a prototype implementation of CloudRecommender, and demonstrate its effectiveness and scalability through a service configuration selection experiment on most of today's prominent cloud providers including Amazon, Azure, and GoGrid.
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paper_title: Learning Ansible

paper_content:

Use Ansible to configure your systems, deploy software, and orchestrate advanced IT tasks About This BookUse Ansible to automate your infrastructure effectively, with minimal effortCustomize and consolidate your configuration management tools with the secure and highly-reliable features of AnsibleUnleash the abilities of Ansible and extend the functionality of your mainframe system through the use of powerful, real-world examplesWho This Book Is ForIf you want to learn how to use Ansible to automate an infrastructure, either from scratch or to augment your current tooling with Ansible, then this is the book for you. It has plenty of practical examples to help you get to grips with Ansible. In Detail Automation includes provisioning new servers, making sure the servers adhere to their role and maintain the desired state from a configuration perspective, and orchestrating various actions across environments and deploying code as expected to all these servers. This is where Ansible steps in. It is secure, highly reliable, and minimalistic in nature. It automates configuration management, application deployment, and many other IT needs.Learning Ansible will equip you with the necessary skills to automate/improve your infrastructure from a configuration management perspective. You will also be able to use Ansible for one-click deployments, provisioning, and orchestrating your infrastructure.
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paper_title: Distributed application configuration, management, and visualization with plush

paper_content:

Support for distributed application management in large-scale networked environments remains in its early stages. Although a number of solutions exist for subtasks of application deployment, monitoring, and maintenance in distributed environments, few tools provide a unified framework for application management. Many of the existing tools address the management needs of a single type of application or service that runs in a specific environment, and these tools are not adaptable enough to be used for other applications or platforms. To this end, we present the design and implementation of Plush, a fully configurable application management infrastructure designed to meet the general requirements of several different classes of distributed applications. Plush allows developers to specifically define the flow of control needed by their computations using application building blocks. Through an extensible resource management interface, Plush supports execution in a variety of environments, including both live deployment platforms and emulated clusters. Plush also uses relaxed synchronization primitives for improving fault tolerance and liveness in failure-prone environments. To gain an understanding of how Plush manages different classes of distributed applications, we take a closer look at specific applications and evaluate how Plush provides support for each.
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paper_title: CloudMap: A Visual Notation for Representing and Managing Cloud Resources

paper_content:

With the vast proliferation of cloud computing technologies, DevOps are inevitably faced with managing large amounts of complex cloud resource configurations. This involves being able to proficiently understand and analyze cloud resource attributes and relationships, and make decisions on demand. However, a majority of cloud tools encode resource descriptions and monitoring and control scripts in tedious textual formats. This presents complex and overwhelming challenges for DevOps to manually read, and iteratively build a mental representation especially when it involves a large number of cloud resources. To alleviate these frustrations we propose a model-driven notation to visually represent, monitor and control cloud resource configurations; managed underneath by existing cloud resource orchestration tools such as Docker. We propose a mindmap-based interface and set of visualization patterns. We have employed an extensive user-study to base design decisions, and validate our work based on experimentation with real-world scenarios. The results show significant productivity and efficiency improvements.
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paper_title: Web Service Composition: A Survey of Techniques and Tools

paper_content:

Web services are a consolidated reality of the modern Web with tremendous, increasing impact on everyday computing tasks. They turned the Web into the largest, most accepted, and most vivid distributed computing platform ever. Yet, the use and integration of Web services into composite services or applications, which is a highly sensible and conceptually non-trivial task, is still not unleashing its full magnitude of power. A consolidated analysis framework that advances the fundamental understanding of Web service composition building blocks in terms of concepts, models, languages, productivity support techniques, and tools is required. This framework is necessary to enable effective exploration, understanding, assessing, comparing, and selecting service composition models, languages, techniques, platforms, and tools. This article establishes such a framework and reviews the state of the art in service composition from an unprecedented, holistic perspective.
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paper_title: URL: A Unified Reinforcement Learning Approach for Autonomic Cloud Management

paper_content:

Cloud computing is emerging as an increasingly important service-oriented computing paradigm. Management is a key to providing accurate service availability and performance data, as well as enabling real-time provisioning that automatically provides the capacity needed to meet service demands. In this paper, we present a unified reinforcement learning approach, namely URL, to automate the configuration processes of virtualized machines and appliances running in the virtual machines. The approach lends itself to the application of real-time autoconfiguration of clouds. It also makes it possible to adapt the VM resource budget and appliance parameter settings to the cloud dynamics and the changing workload to provide service quality assurance. In particular, the approach has the flexibility to make a good trade-off between system-wide utilization objectives and appliance-specific SLA optimization goals. Experimental results on Xen VMs with various workloads demonstrate the effectiveness of the approach. It can drive the system into an optimal or near-optimal configuration setting in a few trial-and-error iterations.
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paper_title: SLA-driven predictive orchestration for distributed cloud-based mobile services

paper_content:

We describe a system for performing SLA-driven management and orchestration of distributed infrastructures composed of services supporting mobile computing use cases. In particular, we focus on a Follow-Me Cloud scenario in which we consider mobile users accessing cloud-enable services. We combine a SLA-driven approach to infrastructure optimization, with forecast-based performance degradation preventive actions and pattern detection for supporting mobile cloud infrastructure management. We present our system's information model and architecture including the algorithmic support and the proposed scenarios for system evaluation.
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paper_title: Energy-Aware Resource Allocation Heuristics for Efficient Management of Data Centers for Cloud Computing

paper_content:

Cloud computing offers utility-oriented IT services to users worldwide. Based on a pay-as-you-go model, it enables hosting of pervasive applications from consumer, scientific, and business domains. However, data centers hosting Cloud applications consume huge amounts of electrical energy, contributing to high operational costs and carbon footprints to the environment. Therefore, we need Green Cloud computing solutions that can not only minimize operational costs but also reduce the environmental impact. In this paper, we define an architectural framework and principles for energy-efficient Cloud computing. Based on this architecture, we present our vision, open research challenges, and resource provisioning and allocation algorithms for energy-efficient management of Cloud computing environments. The proposed energy-aware allocation heuristics provision data center resources to client applications in a way that improves energy efficiency of the data center, while delivering the negotiated Quality of Service (QoS). In particular, in this paper we conduct a survey of research in energy-efficient computing and propose: (a) architectural principles for energy-efficient management of Clouds; (b) energy-efficient resource allocation policies and scheduling algorithms considering QoS expectations and power usage characteristics of the devices; and (c) a number of open research challenges, addressing which can bring substantial benefits to both resource providers and consumers. We have validated our approach by conducting a performance evaluation study using the CloudSim toolkit. The results demonstrate that Cloud computing model has immense potential as it offers significant cost savings and demonstrates high potential for the improvement of energy efficiency under dynamic workload scenarios.
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paper_title: Interconnected Cloud Computing Environments: Challenges, Taxonomy, and Survey

paper_content:

A brief review of the Internet history reveals the fact that the Internet evolved after the formation of primarily independent networks. Similarly, interconnected clouds, also called Inter-cloud, can be viewed as a natural evolution of cloud computing. Recent studies show the benefits in utilizing multiple clouds and present attempts for the realization of an Inter-cloud or federated cloud environment. However, cloud vendors have not taken into account cloud interoperability issues, and each cloud comes with its own solution and interfaces for services. This survey initially discusses all the relevant aspects motivating cloud interoperability. Furthermore, it categorizes and identifies possible cloud interoperability scenarios and architectures. The spectrum of challenges and obstacles that the Inter-cloud realization is faced with are covered, a taxonomy of them is provided, and fitting enablers that tackle each challenge are identified. All these aspects require a comprehensive review of the state of the art, including ongoing projects and studies in the area. We conclude by discussing future directions and trends toward the holistic approach in this regard.
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Title: A Taxonomy and Survey of Cloud Resource Orchestration Techniques

Section 1: INTRODUCTION
Description 1: Introduce the importance and context of cloud resource orchestration in today's computing environment, including the evolution and benefits of public and private clouds.

Section 2: Cloud Resource Orchestration Services and Operations
Description 2: Describe the different layers involved in cloud resource orchestration, including resource provisioning, description, and user interaction layers.

Section 3: CLOUD RESOURCE ORCHESTRATION TAXONOMY
Description 3: Present and explain the proposed taxonomy for cloud resource orchestration, detailing the main dimensions and their sub-dimensions.

Section 4: Resource Types
Description 4: Discuss the types of resources that can be virtualized and orchestrated in a cloud environment.

Section 5: Resource Entity Model
Description 5: Define the concept of a Resource Entity Model and explain the various types and relationships among cloud resources.

Section 6: Related Work: Positioning versus Existing Taxonomies
Description 6: Compare the proposed taxonomy with existing taxonomies and highlight the unique contributions of the current work.

Section 7: Resource Orchestration Capabilities
Description 7: Detail the different capabilities required for cloud resource orchestration, including primitive actions and orchestration strategies.

Section 8: USER TYPES
Description 8: Identify and describe the different types of users involved in cloud resource orchestration, such as DevOps, application developers, and domain experts.

Section 9: RUNTIME ENVIRONMENT
Description 9: Explain the various execution models and virtualization techniques that support cloud resource orchestration.

Section 10: KNOWLEDGE REUSE
Description 10: Discuss the frameworks and techniques for knowledge reuse in cloud resource orchestration, including knowledge representation, acquisition, and discovery.

Section 11: APPLYING THE TAXONOMY: EVALUATION OF CLOUD RESOURCE ORCHESTRATION TECHNIQUES
Description 11: Apply the proposed taxonomy to evaluate and analyze various existing cloud resource orchestration techniques and tools.

Section 12: CONCLUSION
Description 12: Summarize the findings of the survey and propose future directions for research in cloud resource orchestration.