John J. Rofrano

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.

Design considerations for distributed applications

Probably the hardest part about developing a distributed application is determining where to start. There are multiple hardware and software platforms to understand, network traffic implications, and numerous tools and technologies to consider. One question, however, transcends the importance of what platform to pick or what tool to use: that is, how do you design it? This paper represents the results of two years of work with customers regarding this question. The paper explores some of the implications of working in a distributed environment, reviews some rules for data and function placement, and introduces a methodology for distributed application design.

Managing the file system from the kernel

In this paper, we investigate the benefits of adding autonomic capabilities inside the operating system. We have developed and implemented a solution that focuses on three use cases (continuous file permission compliance, dynamic disk cleanup, and accidental removal protection) for the file system, and encapsulates all the respective file system monitoring, troubleshooting and error remedial operations in a Linux kernel module. The main benefits of this approach are the capability to detect issues instantly when they occur, and fix these issues transparently, with the invoking applications being unaware of their occurrence. These capabilities are not present in external agent architectures, including contemporary configuration management systems, like Puppet, Chef, or CFEngine. We have built a prototype and evaluated the performance of the most resource intensive use case, dynamic disk cleanup, using the FileBench file system benchmarking tool.

Design and Evaluation of a Self-Service Delivery Framework

We present a framework for automating change and service request management, a process that has remained almost entirely human-centric, despite the fact that it involves complex workflows, takes a significant amount of time, and is prone to errors. We extend previous work on modeling process complexity to evaluate the impact of automating business constraints (such as policy approvals and entitlements). Our results indicate that automation eliminates a significant amount of operational complexity, reducing it by \(68\%\) compared to the Information Technology Infrastructure Library (ITIL) guidelines, and by \(80\%\) compared to actual client processes. Automation also reduces, between \(55\%\) and \(82\%\) for different client accounts, the average time that elapses from the moment that a change request is received until it starts executing.

BlueShift: Automated application transformation to Cloud Native architectures

▪ Presented BlueShift: Self-service for orchestrating automated tasks (via APIs) and human tasks for end-to-end transformation process including, application discovery, analysis, artifact transformation and enablement of cloud value-add services. ▪ Demonstrated transformation process for PlantsByWebSphere application, with Liberty Profile runtime as a target in BlueMix (cloud-foundry based platform). ▪ Discussed challenges arising in transformation from application complexity and non-functional requirements.

Managing vulnerabilities in a cloud native world with bluefix

Bluefix is a solution we created for managing the vulnerabilities in a cloud native world where clients operate their own DevOp pipelines and design the same management function and assurance of that of traditional managed services. We show that the challenges imposed by container cloud and DevOp culture requires significant departure of service management design. As a case study, we examined how vulnerabilities are managed in the pre-cloud native vs. post-cloud native world, identified control points in both DevOp pipeline as well as cloud service fabric as to enable a scalable and automated vulnerability management solution for IBM container cloud. Our journey and exploration in this area has only just begun, as the lessons learned and many remaining challenges hold much promise and opportunities.