Beniamino Di Martino

Building a mosaic of clouds

The current diversity of Cloud computing services, benefic for the fast development of a new IT market, hinders the easy development, portability and inter-operability of Cloud oriented applications. Developing an application oriented view of Cloud services instead the current provider ones can lead to a step forward in the adoption of Cloud computing on a larger scale than the actual one. In this context, we present a position paper exposing the concepts behind a recent proposal for an open-source application programming interface and platform for dealing with multiple Cloud computing offers.

Cloud Agency: A Mobile Agent Based Cloud System

The cloud paradigm appeared on the computing scene in 2005 with the Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) . After this date, a large set of related technologies has been developed. In the academic world, and especially in the HPC area, cloud computing is in some way in competition with the GRID model, which offers a middleware based approach. One of the solutions proposed is the integration of the two paradigms, in order to use the enormous potential of the existent computational GRIDs in new ways. One of the most diffused problems on this systems is the choice of the correct programming paradigm: many different approaches exist and it is difficult to define which is the approach that best fit with the cloud paradigm. In this paper we propose the integration of a Cloud on GRID architecture with a mobile agent platform. The architecture we propose offer Virtual clusters with full administrative control to final users, adopting an existent GRID architecture and especially its security infrastructure. The mobile agent platform is able to dynamically add and configure services on the virtual clusters. The experience here presented shows that the mobile agent paradigm well fulfills the dynamic properties of the Cloud paradigm and could be a good choice to simply develop application and services able to dynamically adapt themselves to the virtualized environment.

Experiences in building a mOSAIC of clouds

The diversity of Cloud computing services is challenging the application developers as various and non-standard interfaces are provided for these services. Few middleware solutions were developed until now to support the design, deployment and execution of service-independent applications as well as the management of resources from multiple Clouds. This paper focuses on one of these advanced middleware solutions, called mOSAIC. Written after the completion of its development, this paper presents an integrated overview of the mOSAIC approach and the use of its various software prototypes in a Cloud application development process. We are starting from the design concepts and arrive to various applications, as well as to the position versus similar initiatives.

A cloud agency for SLA negotiation and management

Resources management facilities, based on service level agreements, are needed in the Cloud in order to negotiate a collection of inter-connected and virtualized computers between resource providers and consumers. In this paper we present the architectural design of a system named Cloud Agency which aims to respond to this need and to offer added value to the existing Cloud services. This system is in charge to broker the collection of Cloud resources from different providers that fulfills at the best the requirements of users applications. The user is able to delegate to the Agency the necessary checks of the agreement fulfilment, the monitoring of resource utilization and eventually necessary re-negotiations.

Architecturing a sky computing platform

Current Cloud computing solutions force people to be stranded into locked, proprietary systems. In order to overcome this limitation several efforts of the research community are addressing issues such as common programming models, open standard interfaces, adequate service level agreements or portability of applications. In this context, we argue about the need for an open-source Cloud application programming interface and a platform targeted for developing multi-Cloud oriented applications. This paper describes the approach that we propose for a platform that allows the deployment of component-based applications in Cloud environments taking into account multiple Cloud provider offers.

MAGDA: A Mobile Agent based Grid Architecture

Mobile agents mean both a technology and a programming paradigm. They allow for a flexible approach which can alleviate a number of issues present in distributed and Grid-based systems, by means of features such as migration, cloning, messaging and other provided mechanisms. In this paper we describe an architecture (MAGDA – Mobile Agent based Grid Architecture) we have designed and we are currently developing to support programming and execution of mobile agent based application upon Grid systems.

Grid performance and resource management using mobile agents

Mobile agents provide an important paradigm for supporting dynamic services in Computational Grids. We outline reasons why mobile agents are useful and how they can provide support for resource discovery and performance management in the context of service-oriented Grids. We also discuss factors which are likely to limit the uptake of the mobile agent approach, and how some of these restrictions can be overcome. This approach is subsequently exemplified by means of a mobile agent based programming and execution framework, the MAGDA system.

An intrusion detection framework for supporting SLA assessment in Cloud Computing

Cloud Computing is the emerging paradigm in distributed environment. It is an opportunity for users to reduce costs and increase efficiency. Cloud Computing represents both a technology for using computing infrastructures in a more efficient way, and a business model for selling computing services and resources. In this context, cyber attacks represent a serious danger, which can compromise the quality of service delivered to the customers. In this paper, a mOSAIC-based framework for providing distributed intrusion detection in Cloud Computing is proposed. It is an architectural framework that collects information at different Cloud architectural levels, using multiple distributed security components, which can be used to perform complex event correlation analysis to identify intrusions in the Cloud system that involve Service Level Agreement violations.

Cloud Brokering as a Service

Cloud computing is a technology of enormous scope for innovation especially in a volatile market and rapidly evolving, in which, the ability to exploit new technologies and remaining competitive is more important. However the choice of Cloud providers, whose offers best fit the requirements of a particular application, is a complex issue due to the variety of potential options and the number of variables to consider. In this paper we propose a distributed cloud broker that have the main task of selecting dynamically a set of Cloud resources, from different vendors, that best fits users requirements. Brokering has been developed as a service over the Cloud to exploit the elasticity of such compute utility and to provide scalability respect to a dynamic changing workload.

mOSAIC-Based Intrusion Detection Framework for Cloud Computing

In recent years, with the growing popularity of Cloud Computing, security in Cloud has become an important issue. Cloud Computing paradigm represents an opportunity for users to reduce costs and increase efficiency providing an alternative way of using services. It represents both a technology for using computing infrastructures in a more efficient way and a business model for selling computing resources. The possibility of dynamically acquire and use resources and services on the base of a pay-per-use model, implies incredible flexibility in terms of management, which is otherwise often hard to address. On the other hand, because of this flexibility, Denial of Service attacks represent a serious danger, which can compromise performance and availability of services provided to final users. In this paper, a mOSAIC-based framework for providing distributed intrusion detection in Cloud Computing is proposed. It is an architectural framework that collects information at different Cloud architectural levels, using multiple security components, which are dynamically deployed as a distributed architecture. The proposed solution allows to monitor different attack symptoms on different Cloud architectural levels, which can be used to perform complex event correlation and diagnosis analysis of intrusion in the Cloud system.