Lawrence Wilcock

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.

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

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.

Business-driven IT for SAP The Model Information Flow

Enterprises rely on efficient and flexible IT services. While complexity of services is increasing, personnel to provide and manage services will remain limited. At the same time, IT environments are becoming more dynamic, from the business side as well as from the infrastructure side. The ability to incorporate change faster, more efficiently and reliably has become a measure of quality of enterprise IT organizations. IT responds to these challenges by decoupling functions into services and by improving the linkages between business processes and the supporting IT systems. Service-oriented architecture has become the accepted pattern for modern enterprise IT. This paper presents the model information flow. It is part of a collaboration between HP Labs and SAP Research. The goal of the collaboration is to explore new approaches of model-driven planning, design and management of enterprise applications in a shared and virtualized IT infrastructure. The goal is to substantially improve the linkage between the business and the IT layer and die ability to manage and accommodate change more efficiently and in a largely automated manner.

High-speed Storage Nodes for the Cloud

In this paper, we describe an architecture for high-speed storage nodes intended for supporting cloud-based storage I/O intensive applications such as file servers, backup servers and databases. The nodes can host multiple virtual machines each having direct access to a storage array via Single Route I/O Virtualization (SR-IOV). This is done in a way which does not compromise security. We demonstrate that SR-IOV imposes negligible overhead for storage I/O and provides the hosted virtual machines with four times the storage I/O bandwidth than is available from the same hardware when I/O is redirected through the hyper visor. We describe how the storage nodes are incorporated into a heterogeneous Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) consisting of mixed storage and compute nodes.

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.

Loom: Complex large-scale visual insight for large hybrid IT infrastructure management

Abstract Interactive visual exploration techniques (IVET) such as those advocated by Shneiderman and extreme scale visual analytics have successfully increased our understanding of a variety of domains that produce huge amounts of complex data. In spite of their complexity, IT infrastructures have not benefited from the application of IVET techniques. Loom is inspired in IVET techniques and builds on them to tame increasing complexity in IT infrastructure management systems guaranteeing interactive response times and integrating key elements for IT management: Relationships between managed entities coming from different IT management subsystems, alerts and actions (or reconfigurations) of the IT setup. The Loom system builds on two main pillars: (1) a multiplex graph spanning data from different ITIMs; and (2) a novel visualisation arrangement: the Loom “Thread” visualisation model. We have tested this in a number of real-world applications, showing that Loom can handle million of entities without losing information, with minimum context switching, and offering better performance than other relational/graph-based systems. This ensures interactive response times (few seconds as 90th percentile). The value of the “Thread” visualisation model is shown in a qualitative analysis of users’ experiences with Loom.