Frank M. Goetz

Cloud Capability Estimation and Recommendation in Black-Box Environments Using Benchmark-Based Approximation

As cloud computing has become popular and the number of cloud providers has proliferated over time, the first barrier to cloud users will be how to accurately estimate performance capabilities of many different clouds and then, select a right one for given complex workload based on estimates. Such cloud capability estimation and selection can be a big challenge since most clouds can be considered as black-boxes to cloud users by abstracting underlying infrastructures and technologies. This paper describes a cloud recommender system to recommend an optimal cloud configuration to users based on accurate estimates. To achieve this, our system generates the capability vector that consists of relative performance scores of resource types (e.g., CPU, memory, and disk) estimated for given user workload using benchmarks. Then, a search algorithm has been developed to identify an optimal cloud configuration based on these collected capability vectors. Experiments show our approach accurately estimate the performance capability (less than 10% error) while scalable in large search space.

Towards Simplifying and Automating Business Process Lifecycle Management in Hybrid Clouds

Business Process Management (BPM) software provides visibility into business processes in organizations of all sizes and helps increase process efficiency continuously. However, the time and effort involved in modeling, deploying and executing a business process is tremendous and as a result organizations struggle to agilely adapt business processes to dynamic business requirements. On the other hand, the growing popularity of cloud computing poses opportunities and challenges on how business processes can leverage resource outsourcing and elasticity. In light of the above, this paper presents a business process management platform that assists business analysts lacking necessary programming expertise by automating manual steps and providing guidance and recommendations to quickly and efficiently design, implement, deploy and execute business processes in a hybrid cloud environment.