Hidayatullah Shaikh

Business-to-business integration with tpaML and a business-to-business protocol framework

In business-to-business interactions spanning electronic commerce, supply chain management, and other applications, the terms and conditions describing the electronic interactions between businesses can be expressed as an electronic contract or trading partner agreement (TPA). From the TPA, configuration information and code that embody the terms and conditions can be generated automatically at each trading partners site. The TPA expresses the rules of interaction between the parties to the TPA while maintaining complete independence of the internal processes at each party from the other parties. It represents a long-running conversation that comprises a single unit of business. This paper summarizes the needs of interbusiness electronic interactions. Then it describes the basic principles of electronic TPAs, followed by an overview of the proposed TPA language. The business-to-business protocol framework (BPF) provides various tools and run-time services for supporting TPA-based interaction and integration with business applications. Finally, we describe examples of solutions constructed using TPAs and BPF.

Controlling Quality of Service in Multi-Tier Web Applications

The need for service differentiation in Internet services has motivated interest in controlling multi-tier web applications. This paper describes a tier-to-tier (T2T) management architecture that supports decentralized actuator management in multi-tier systems, and a testbed implementation of this architecture using commercial software products. Based on testbed experiments and analytic models, we gain insight into the value of coordinated exploitation of actuators on multiple tiers, especially considerations for control efficiency and control granularity. For control efficiency, we show that more effective utilization of tiers can be achieved by using actuators on the bottleneck tier rather than only using actuators on the entry tier. For granularity of control (the ability to achieve a wide range of service level objectives) we show that a fine granularity of control can be achieved through a coordinated, cross-tier exploitation of coarse grained actuators (e.g., multiprogramming level), an approach that can greatly reduce controllerinduced variability.

The Coyote Project: Framework for Multi-party E-Commerce

The Internet provides the opportunity for quickly setting up deals between businesses for promoting each others products, and to jointly offer new services. Specification and enforcement of such deals stretch traditional transaction processing concepts in several directions since they involve independent businesses with their own internal processes. First, the greater variability in response time in business to business interaction creates a need for asynchronous and event-driven processing, in which correct handling of reissued and cancelled requests is critical. Second, a new transaction processing paradigm is required that supports different views of a unit of business for all participants, i.e., service providers as well as end consumers. Between any two interacting parties, there may be several related interactions dispersed in time, creating a long running conversation. This paper describes our approach (Coyote) to solving these problems including use of a service contract for specifying the rules of interaction across businesses, and directly generating code for enforcement of the contract. We finally describe the architecture and a prototype of a system which implements the Coyote concepts.

Modeling Differentiated Services of Multi-Tier Web Applications

In this paper we present a hybrid performance model for modeling differentiated service of multi-tier web applications with per-tier concurrency limits, cross-tier interactions, as well as a work-conserving resource allocation model. The service dependencies between multiple tiers are captured first using a layered queueing model. We then show how to model per-tier concurrency limits and service differentiation between multiple classes while maintaining work conservation at each tier. We use a function approximation approach combined with a coupled processor model. Our model is calibrated from an actual multitier J2EE testbed, and we show the ability of the model to accurately model common performance metrics. Our proposed (layered) model shows 78% improvement in root mean square error over a single-tier machine repair model as well as a tandem queue model. We also demonstrate one application of the model for model-based resource allocation.

Reducing Complexity of Software Deployment with Delta Configuration

Deploying a modern software service usually involves installing several software components, and configuring these components properly to realize the complex interdependencies between them. This process, which accounts for a significant portion of information technology (IT) cost, is complex and error-prone. In this paper, we propose delta configuration - an approach that reduces the cost of software deployment by eliminating a large number of choices on parameter values that administrators have to make during deployment. In delta configuration, the complex software stack of a distributed service is first installed and tested in a test environment. The resulting software images are then captured and used for deployment in production environments. To deploy a software service, we only need to copy these pre-configured software images into a production environment and modify them to account for the difference between the test environment and a production environment. We have implemented a prototype system that achieves software deployment using delta configuration of the configuration state captured inside virtual machines. We perform a case study to demonstrate that our scheme leads to substantial reduction in complexity for the customer, over the traditional software deployment method.

Taking IT Management Services to a Cloud

While IT management services represent a mature subject in the IT business arena, the emerging cloud generation of management services require critical enhancements to the current processes and technologies in order to deliver IT management remotely with rapid on-boarding and minimal labor involvement from experts, to be affordable and scale up to the promise of the cloud. Traditional Remote Infrastructure Management (RIM) service providers use their own Network Operations Centers (NOC) to remotely monitor and manage customers’ IT infrastructure. The primary business value for RIM services is that it helps global enterprises to small and medium businesses (SMB) to outsource the burden of managing their IT infrastructure. Although the IT management service itself delivered this way is more affordable, the RIM customer on-boarding process particularly is not, taking between one to two months of expensive labor. This paper describes what and how IT management processes, technologies and skills can be improved to provide remote customer on-boarding at an appropriate speed for delivery from the cloud. Our contributions consist of major enhancements in a key on-boarding area, namely IT discovery. Experimental results show that our approach aligns the RIM on-boarding methods to the cloud expectations both from a time as well as quality perspective.

Desktop workload study with implications for desktop cloud resource optimization

Desktop cloud is a new delivery model in which end users connect to virtual desktops running in remote data centers. This paradigm offers multiple benefits both in terms of manageability as well as efficiency improvements. However, realizing this potential requires better understanding of desktop workload and its implications for desktop consolidation. We analyze CPU and memory usage on a sample of 35 desktops using a fine-grained 10 second averaging interval. Results provide insights into achievable efficiency improvements from desktop consolidation as well as detailed autocorrelation and variability behavior as a function of number of aggregated desktops. We also propose an interactivity classification method leading to functional form suitable for estimating residual durations of interactivity states. This finding can be leveraged in on-line proactive management algorithms for desktop cloud optimization.

Graph-Based Cloud Service Placement

The emergent IT clouds as the future of datacenters enable considerable opportunities for the services creation, deployment, management and usability. Users all over the world, from individuals to businesses have been taking advantage of the new cloud services automation and scalability benefits. However, the services creation and business support are still dominated by intensive manual labor. Offerings with similar infrastructure requirements and dependencies are mainly built from scratch as separated entities, making the service development inefficient and error prone. We propose a graph based solution for semi-automated service creation, which expresses the mapping between a business support system and an operations support system. We first identify and expose, at the leaf level of our graph, the meaningful IT operations in the form of basic services. Then, we extend our graph by representing existing services offerings in terms of these operation level service definitions as well as simpler services offerings. At service creation time, an offering manager can re-combine existing building blocks to define new services, besides implementing new blocks down to the operations support system. Our solution takes into consideration the constraints and costs of the service offering sub-components as far as their mapping down to datacenter resources for optimizing the service placement into data-centers. We present a study of the Desktop Service use case.

Evolution of the IBM cloud: enabling an enterprise cloud services ecosystem

Cloud computing is a new paradigm that is transforming the information technology (IT) industry and reshaping the way enterprise services are developed, deployed, sold, delivered, and consumed. Instead of managing complex IT systems, customers can focus on the core competence of their enterprise while obtaining all required IT functions as a service. From the perspective of a cloud provider, remaining competitive and realizing full potential of economies of scale that the cloud paradigm promises require extreme levels of standardization, automation, and optimization. This paper describes the evolution of the Common Cloud Management Platform (CCMP), a management system providing business and operations support for cloud services. We cover its initial implementation and applications, discuss the latest challenges faced when adapting enterprise solutions to the cloud, and introduce the exploratory research topics to which this work led. We address the business services aspects, including framework-based integration of the catalog, and customer and revenue management, as well as the operational aspects, including novel approaches for scalable virtual machine provisioning and adaptive workload placement optimization. We discuss architecture, design, and implementation details of key CCMP components and highlight the challenging aspects of providing such architecture while promoting scalability, modularity, and reuse.

Virtual Hypervisor: Enabling fair and economical resource partitioning in cloud environments

Virtualization has rapidly gained popularity affecting multiple levels of computing stack. Since it decouples resources from their users it provides greater flexibility in terms of resource allocation but also brings new challenges for optimal design, provisioning and runtime management of systems. Cloud computing is a paradigm of computing that offers virtualized resources “as a service.” Cloud Managers are responsible for lifecycle management of virtual resources, efficient utilization of physical resources and exposing basic operational APIs to users. Software solutions can then be deployed on these virtual resources. In this paper we propose a Virtual Hypervisor abstraction allowing solution managers to have an improved control over the resource allocation decisions regarding their virtual machines while maintaining cloud managers role as the ultimate physical resource manager. We also introduce a novel resource allocation algorithm illustrating how the Virtual Hypervisor abstraction can be efficiently realized by the global cloud manager. We also use simulations to illustrate that our algorithm can be used to achieve fairer resource sharing and isolation across different Virtual Hypervisors.