Clarissa Cassales Marquezan

CloudWave: Where adaptive cloud management meets DevOps

The transition to cloud computing offers a large number of benefits, such as lower capital costs and a highly agile environment. Yet, the development of software engineering practices has not kept pace with this change. Moreover, the design and runtime behavior of cloud based services and the underlying cloud infrastructure are largely decoupled from one another.This paper describes the innovative concepts being developed by CloudWave to utilize the principles of DevOps to create an execution analytics cloud infrastructure where, through the use of programmable monitoring and online data abstraction, much more relevant information for the optimization of the ecosystem is obtained. Required optimizations are subsequently negotiated between the applications and the cloud infrastructure to obtain coordinated adaption of the ecosystem. Additionally, the project is developing the technology for a Feedback Driven Development Standard Development Kit which will utilize the data gathered through execution analytics to supply developers with a powerful mechanism to shorten application development cycles.

Cloud Adaptation and Application (Re-)Distribution: Bridging the Two Perspectives

Cloud developers have to make several decisions when running their application in a cloud environment that may lead to conflicting objectives, inefficient deployment, and inappropriate or not existing adaptation strategies. Proper decision-support tools and processes are therefore needed to make cloud developers aware of the issues that need to be considered when deploying and running applications in the Cloud. Current decision support tools for cloud developers do not provide a structured and organized process in which the cloud developers can systematically check their choices when planning the deployment, execution, and adaptation of applications in the Cloud. In this paper, we combine two previous works and introduce an approach for identifying the options for (re-)deploying application in cloud providers infrastructures and the possible strategies of adaptation that can be used by the deployed application at runtime. The key contribution is a support process that synthesizes the two approaches. We also describe a case study where our support process is applied and we indicate the alternatives for application (re-)deployment and adaptation.

Future internet technology for the future of transport and logistics

International freight transport is the foundation of global trade, representing a large and growing industry where various stakeholders collaborate to transport goods around the world. The ICT infrastructures currently employed throughout logistics business networks are limited and the use of manual systems is common. This drastically hampers the operational efficiency of logistic service providers, carriers, and the various other stakeholders involved in transport processes. This paper presents an initial conceptual architecture for an ICT platform to overcome these deficiencies. The architecture is built on top of Future Internet technologies that provide generic capabilities for the efficient and effective development of cloud-based applications based on the Internet of Services, Internet of Things, and Internet of Contents with integrated security and privacy mechanisms.

Runtime Management of Multi-level SLAs for Transport and Logistics Services

SLA management of non-computational services, such as transport and logistics services, may differ from SLA management of computational services, such as cloud or web services. As an important difference, SLA management for transport and logistics services has to consider so called frame SLAs. A frame SLA is a general agreement that constitutes a long-term contract between parties. The terms and conditions of the frame SLA become the governing terms and conditions for all specific SLAs established under such a frame SLA. Not considering the relationships between frame SLAs, specific SLAs and QoS monitoring information may lead to partial conclusions and decisions, thereby resulting in avoidable penalties. Based on a real industry case in the transport and logistics domain, this paper elaborates on a multi-level run-time SLA management approach for non-computational services that takes into account those relationships. We describe a cloud-based software component, the BizSLAM App, able to automatically manage multi-level SLAs by extending SLA management solutions from service-oriented computing. We demonstrate the feasibility and usefulness of the SLA management approach in an industrial context.

3-D cloud monitoring: Enabling effective cloud infrastructure and application management

A cloud environment is a complex environment composed of many different entities and layers. Each of these cloud entities may be furnished with mechanisms offering various management actions. For any given situation, different management actions may be applicable and often simultaneously. Enforcing isolated management actions or combining contradictory management actions may negatively affect cloud application quality and cloud infrastructure performance. This means that correctly selecting and effectively combining these management actions for a given situation becomes an important challenge in cloud computing. In this paper, we address the problem of identifying situations where more than one management action can be performed. The key contributions of our paper are: (1) a three dimensional (3-D) monitoring model for analyzing cloud monitoring information; (2) the concept and formalization of Context of Interest (CoI) that specifies how to retrieve meaningful information from the 3-D model to support the coordination of management actions between cloud infrastructure and application. We conducted experiments in a real testbed using Openstack and the WordPress Web site application. Our results show that analyzing cloud monitoring information using the 3-D model and the CoI can support a more effective identification of management actions to be taken.

Towards exploiting the full adaptation potential of cloud applications

Current technology for cloud application adaptation fails to capture two fundamental aspect of cloud environments: multiple adaptation options and interferences and dependencies among these multiple mechanisms. Addressing these aspects requires a significant extension of existing cloud tools and frameworks for engineering and executing cloud application adaptations. They should explicitly take into account: all entities of the cloud environment relevant for adaptation decisions; the concrete adaptation actions that these cloud entities may perform; and the mutual dependencies between those entities and actions. In this paper we provide the first insights towards such novel technology. As main contribution, we systematically elicit the key entities related to adaptations inside a cloud environment and explicitly document those in a conceptual model. To build this model we surveyed the literature, discussed with industrial partners with experience in cloud computing, and analyzed commercial solutions. We also provide a case study based on Amazon Web Services solutions, to show how our conceptual model can be instantiated and help developers to identify possible cloud application adaptation strategies.

Extending WS-Agreement to Support Automated Conformity Check on Transport and Logistics Service Agreements

Checking whether the agreed service quality attributes are fulfilled or maintained during the service life-cycle is a very important task for SLA Service Level Agreement enforcement. In this paper, we leverage conformance checking techniques developed for computational services to automate the conformity checking of transport & logistics services. Our solution extends the WS-Agreement metamodel to support the definition of frame and specific SLAs. With this extension, we define a new validation operation for the conformity check of transport & logistics SLAs based on CSPs solvers. The key contribution of our work is that, as far as we know, it is the first definition of an automated conformity check solution for long term agreements in the transport & logistics domain. Nonetheless, other domains in which similar SLAs are defined can also benefit from our solution.

Efficient configuration of monitoring slices for cloud platform administrators

Monitoring is an important issue in cloud environments because it assures that acquired cloud slices attend the users expectations. However, these environments are multitenant and dynamic, requiring automation techniques to offload cloud administrators. In a previous work, we proposed FlexACMS: a framework to automate monitoring configuration related to cloud slices using multiple monitoring solutions. In this work, we enhanced FlexACMS to allow dynamic and automatic attribution of monitoring configuration tasks to servers without administrator intervention, which was not available in previous version. FlexACMS also considers the monitoring server load when attributing configuration tasks, which allows load balancing between monitoring servers. The evaluation showed that enhancements reduced FlexACMS response time up to 60% in comparison to previous version. The scalability evaluation of enhanced version demonstrated the feasibility of our approach in large scale cloud environments.

Self-* and P2P for Network Management

In 2006, the NMRG of the IRTF along with the EMANICS project jointly organized a meeting to discuss problems and future directions of network management research. During this meeting two problems were particularly mentioned: the dominant investigations on APIs, protocols, architectures, and frameworks; and the need of further investigations on fully distributed and cooperative management solutions. Reactions to solve those problems have been attempted, such as the employment of self-* properties and autonomic computing, and in parallel the use of P2P technologies. Despite the contributions introduced by those efforts, they still follow a traditional fashion of building networkmanagement applications and did not provide innovations on the way of designing those applications. In this book, we proposed the investigation of designing network and service management solutions based on combining self-* properties and P2P to provide innovative network management application models.

Principles of the Self-* P2P Design

This chapter provides the description of the conditions on the network management community that lead to the proposal of the investigation of joint use of self-* properties and P2P. Fundamental questions are proposed and used to support the proposed investigation. We also describe the features of the network environments that could benefit from a self-* P2P network management alternative and introduce the management requirements associated to these environments. Due to the fact that the literature shows different point of views related to self-* properties, autonomic computing, peer-to-peer, and cooperation, this chapter also describes the meanings of the aforementioned concepts in the context of this book as well as their relationship to the self-* P2P design. In addition, integration requirements are proposed to be followed on the joint exploration of self-* properties and P2P so that it becomes possible to design fully distributed and cooperative network management applications. A correspondence between concurrent attributes and the integration requirements is also examined in this chapter. Finally, the methodology to conduct the investigation relies on exploring case studies where self-* properties and P2P can be used together in order to improve a network management solution.