Johannes Kirschnick

Toward an architecture for the automated provisioning of cloud services

The automated provisioning of services in cloud computing presents many challenges. Users can request virtual machines from cloud infrastructure providers, but these machines have to be configured and managed properly. This article describes an architecture that enables the automated deployment and management of the virtual infrastructure and software of services deployed in the cloud. The architecture takes a template description of a service, which encapsulates requirements, options, as well as behavior for a collection of resources and orchestrates the provisioning of this service into a newly created set of virtual resources. The template is used for integrating the deployment and reconfiguration behavior of a service in which logical components are described along with options to scale them and appropriately change their configuration. Services are described through a set of components, which can easily be mapped and remapped to dynamically created resources, letting services take full advantage of flexible cloud resources.

Elastic monitoring framework for cloud infrastructures

This study presents a scalable and elastic distributed system for monitoring cloud infrastructure based on a pure peer-to-peer architecture. Its distributed nature enables deploying long-living queries across the network to monitor a diverse set of entities and metrics, spanning across all layers of a cloud stack that can change rapidly. This allows for aggregating low-level metrics from operating systems, to higher-level application-specific metrics derived from services, databases or application log files. The observed metrics and information can be evaluated and used to reliably trigger policies to automate complex management tasks within a cloud environment. The architecture incorporates a query framework for obtaining high-level information and a policy framework to provide self-management capabilities to monitored cloud infrastructure. The system has been implemented as a proof of concept. Details and statistical results are provided to validate the scalability of the underlying architecture.

Towards an architecture for deploying elastic services in the cloud

Cloud computing infrastructure services enable the flexible creation of virtual infrastructures on‐demand. However, the creation of infrastructures is only a part of the process for provisioning services. Other steps such as installation, deployment, configuration, monitoring and management of software components are needed to fully provide services to end‐users in the cloud. This paper describes a peer‐to‐peer architecture to automatically deploy services on cloud infrastructures. The architecture uses a component repository to manage the deployment of these software components, enabling elasticity by using the underlying cloud infrastructure provider. The life cycle of these components is described in this paper, as well as the language for defining them. We also describe the open‐source proof‐of‐concept implementation. Some technical information about this implementation together with some statistical results are also provided. Copyright

VATS: Virtualized-Aware Automated Test Service

It is anticipated that by 2015 more than 75% of Information Technology infrastructure will be purchased as a service from service providers. Services will be hosted in virtualized shared resource pools referred to as Clouds. Service providers will need to ensure that customer performance requirements are satisfied while consuming an acceptable quantity of resources. This paper describes a Virtualization-aware Automated Testing Service (VATS). VATS is a framework for automated test execution in Cloud computing environments. It executes tests, manipulates virtualized infrastructure, and collects performance information. VATS uses HP LoadRunner as a load generator and provides the foundation for an automatic performance evaluator for Cloud environments. A case study describes our use of VATS with an SAP R/3 system running in a Xen-based virtualized resource pool. The results from VATS are used to determine the impact of virtual machine configuration parameters on a SAP system.

One Is Not Enough: A Hybrid Approach for IT Change Planning

We propose a novel hybrid planning approach for the automated generation of IT change plans. The algorithm addresses an abstraction mismatch between refinement of tasks and reasoning about the lifecycle and state-constraints of domain objects. To the best of our knowledge, it is the first approach to address this abstraction mismatch for IT Change Management and to be based on Artificial Intelligence planning techniques. This has several advantages over previously existing research including increased readability, expressiveness, and maintainability of the descriptions. We developed the foundations of the approach and successfully validated it by applying it to change request planning for TikiWiki , a Content Management System.

Cells: A Self-Hosting Virtual Infrastructure Service

We describe the design and implementation of Cells, a novel multi-tenanted virtual infrastructure service. Cells has the unique property of being self-hosting: it operates its own management system within one of the tenant virtual infrastructures that it manages and therefore benefits from the same security, flexibility and scalability as other tenant services. Cells is also differentiated by its declarative interface for infrastructure configuration, and its fine-grained control of network and storage connections within and between tenant infrastructures.