Christopher C. Young

Workload Migration into Clouds Challenges, Experiences, Opportunities

The steady drumbeat of Cloud as a disruptive influence for Infrastructure Service Providers (ISP’s) and the enablement vehicle for Software As A Service (SAAS)providers can be heard loud and clear in the industry today. In fact, Cloud is probably at the peak of the hype curve, and already there are identified challenges associated with effective deployment for business critical applications (so called Production Applications) in mature enterprises. One of these challenges is the smooth migration of workload from the previous environment to the new cloud enabled environment in a cost effective way, with minimal disruption and risk. In this paper we introduce extensions to an integrated automation capability called the Darwin framework that enables workload migration for this scenario and discuss the impact that automated migration has on the cost and risks normally associated with migration to clouds.

Image selection as a service for cloud computing environments

Customers of Cloud Services are expected to choose specific machine images to instantiate in order to host their workloads. Unfortunately very little information is provided to the users to enable them to make intelligent choices. We believe that as the number of images proliferates it will become increasingly difficult for users to decide effectively. Cloud service providers often allow their customers to instantiate standard system images, to modify their instances, and to store images of these customized instances for public or private future use. Storing modified instances as images enables customers to avoid re-provisioning and re-configuration of required resources thereby reducing their future costs. However Cloud service providers generally do not expose details regarding the configurations of the images in a rigorous canonical fashion nor offer services that assist clients in the best target image selection to support client transformation objectives. Rather, they allow customers to enter a free-form description of an image based on clients best effort. This means in order to find a “best fit” image to instantiate, a human user must review potentially thousands of image descriptions, reading each description to evaluate its suitability as a platform to host their source application. Furthermore, the actual content of the selected image may differ greatly from its description. Finally, even images that have been customized and retained for future use may need additional provisioning and customization to accommodate specific needs. In this paper we propose a service that accumulates image configuration details in a canonical fashion and a further service that employs an algorithm to order images per best fit /least cost in conformance to user-specified policies. These services collectively facilitate workload transformation into enterprise cloud environments.

CloudAffinity: A framework for matching servers to cloudmates

Increasingly organizations are considering moving their workloads to clouds to take advantage of the anticipated benefits of a more cost effective and agile IT infrastructure. A key component of a cloud service, as it is exposed to the consumer, is the published selection of instance resource configurations (CPU, memory, and disk). The number of instance configurations, as well as the specific values that characterize them, form important decisions for the cloud service provider. This paper explores these resource configurations; examines how well a traditional data center fits into the cloud model from a resource allocation perspective; and proposes a framework, named CloudAffinity, aimed at selecting an optimal number of configurations based on customer requirements.

Opportunities in software engineering research for web API consumption

Nowadays, invoking third party code increasingly involves calling web services via their web APIs, as opposed to the more traditional scenario of downloading a library and invoking the librarys API. However, there are also new challenges for developers calling these web APIs. In this paper, we highlight a broad set of these challenges and argue for resulting opportunities for software engineering research to support developers in consuming web APIs. We outline two specific research threads in this context: (1) web API specification curation, which enables us to know the signatures of web APIs, and (2) static analysis that is capable of extracting URLs, HTTP methods etc. of web API calls. Furthermore, we present new work on how we combine (1) and (2) to provide IDE support for application developers consuming web APIs. As web APIs are used broadly, research in supporting the consumption of web APIs offers exciting opportunities.

Identifying resources for cloud garbage collection

Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) clouds provide users with the ability to easily and quickly provision servers. A recent study found that one in three data center servers continues to consume resources without producing any useful work. A number of techniques have been proposed to identify such unproductive instances. However, those approaches adopt the strategy to identify idle cloud instances based on resource utilization. Resource utilization as indicator alone could be misleading, which is especially true for enterprise cloud environment. In this paper, we present Pleco, a tool that detects unproductive instances in IaaS clouds. Pleco captures dependency information between users and cloud instances by constructing a weighted reference model based on application knowledge. To handle cases of insufficient application knowledge, Pleco also supplements its dependency results with a machine learning model trained on resource utilization data. Pleco gives a confidence level and justification for each identified unproductive instances. Cloud administrators can then take different actions according to the information provided by Pleco. Pleco is lightweight and requires no modification to existing applications.

A Novel Service Composition Approach for Application Migration to Cloud

Migrating business applications to cloud can be costly, labor-intensive, and error-prone due to the complexity of business applications, the constraints of the clouds, and the limitations of existing migration techniques provided by migration service vendors. However, the emerging software-as-a-service offering model of migration services makes it possible to combine multiple migration services for a single migration task. In this paper, we propose a novel migration service composition approach to achieve a cost-effective migration solution. In particular, we first formalize the migration service composition problem into an optimization model. Then, we present an algorithm to determine the optimal composition solution for a given migration task. Finally, using synthetic trace driven simulations, we validate the effectiveness and efficiency of the proposed optimization model and algorithm.

An optimization model of setting up images for server provisioning in cloud service

Efficient and flexible server provisioning is one of the most important criteria in measuring quality of cloud service. In order to save time and mitigate risk, images are set up as templates. And to provision a server, the cloud service provider replicates a selected image and then customize it to fulfill the server request. Therefore image set-up is vital to the efficiency and flexibility of cloud service. In this paper, we propose an optimization model of setting up images and mapping server request to correct image in server provisioning, with the purpose of minimizing total cost of setting up images, maintaining images and provisioning servers. After that, we compare the proposed approach with the vanilla image approach in server provisioning with numerical experiment.