Marco Ughetti

Development of Agent-Based, Peer-to-Peer Mobile Applications on ANDROID with JADE

In this paper, we describe how to develop peer-to-peer and social applications for the ANDROID SDK, the new mobile platform delivered by Google within the Open Handset Alliance at november 2007. In particular we focus on using JADE, a popular open source framework that facilitates the development of interoperable intelligent multi-agent systems. In our opinion JADE, thanks to the expressiveness of its communication model, brings strong added value to ANDROID SDK platform in the development of innovative applications based on social models and peer-to-peer paradigm.

Scalability Patterns for Platform-as-a-Service

Platform-as-a-Service is a cloud-based approach that provides enterprises with all the functionalities for developing, deploying, and administering services, without the burden of installing, configuring, and managing the underlying middleware, operating system, and hardware. In this context, scalability becomes a fundamental requirement, and appropriate solutions need to be studied and evaluated. In this paper, we present different scalability patterns for a Platform-as-a-Service infrastructure and a two-level approach to performance monitoring allowing automatic scalability management. We also provide a performance evaluation of the scalability patterns on a Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) PaaS, which considers the impact on performance of SOA security standards.

A Competitive Scalability Approach for Cloud Architectures

The success of cloud computing has radically changed the way in which services are implemented and deployed, and made accessible to external and remote users. The cloud computing paradigm, in fact, supports a vision of distributed IT where software services and applications are outsourced and used on a pay-as-you-go basis. In this context, the ability to guarantee an effective management of cloud performance and to support automatic scalability become fundamental requirements. Cloud users are increasingly interested in a transparent and coherent vision of cloud, where performance is guaranteed in different scenarios, and under different and heterogeneous loads. In this paper, we analyze the benefits of an integrated scalability approach at different layers of the cloud stack, focusing on the computing infrastructure and database layers. To this aim, we provide different performance metrics and a set of rules based on them to evaluate the status of the cloud stack and scale it on demand to maintain stable performance. We then implement a proof-of-concept architecture to experimentally analyze cloud performance in three scenarios of scalability: computing infrastructure only, database only, and the case in which computing infrastructure and database compete for resources.

A Cloud Federation Architecture

Cloud Computing is the state of the art computation paradigm enabling providers to offer computing resources to customers in a pay-per-use fashion. Nowadays public Cloud providers offer similar services within few service models, mainly IaaS and PaaS. Cloud providers give to the user the feeling to dispose of infinite resources, thus having to predict the user requirements in order to provide services with minimal costs, maintaining at the same time high levels of SLAs. In order to achieve this goal, Cloud providers can cooperate together to bring new business opportunities, such as expanding available resources, achieving cost effective asset optimization and adopting power saving policies. Cloud Federation allows different Cloud providers the opportunity to work collaboratively to offer best services to customers and contemporary to improve their productivity. Customers can advantage from Cloud Federation for a larger offer of available services, the capability of price comparison and the removal of vendor lock-in. In this paper we describe a platform that enables the federation of several heterogeneous Cloud Providers to allow the customers choosing and activating Cloud services from a central platform, bringing more attractive price policy to customers. The authors introduce a prototype of Cloud Federation platform based on a central infrastructure tested to manage OpenStack, CloudStack and Amazon EC2 providers, thus allowing the user to select the best services in terms of either technical requirements or price policy and activate them without having to explicitly register to each of the federated providers. The prototype is designed to accept different types of Cloud service models by means of transparent interfaces developed around a billing and a metering module, respectively to bill the service to the customer and to collect information about the health status of the federated platforms.