Michael R. Head

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.

Towards Self-Assisted Troubleshooting for the Deployment of Private Clouds

Acquiring a private computing cloud is the first step that an enterprise would choose to enable the cloud model and get its considerable benefits while keeping the control within the enterprise. The enterprise level applications that provide the infrastructure enabling cloud computing services are typically built by integrating inter-related complex software components. Critical challenges of these applications are the increasing level of inter-component dependencies and the customized growth, which make recurrent deployment of such applications, as the one required in private clouds, labor intensive and error prone. In this paper we investigate the type of issues faced when deploying a cloud computing management infrastructure and propose a solution to self-assist the deployment. We show how by leveraging virtual image technologies we can detect faulty installations and their signatures early in the deployment process. We also propose a methodology to capture in a shared repository and update these signatures for reuse in subsequent deployments in the form of two level signature patterns. We explore the perspective of our solution and criteria of analysis.

An Ontology Based Approach for Cloud Services Catalog Management

As more and more service providers choose to deliver services on common Cloud infrastructures, it becomes important to formally represent knowledge in a services catalog to enable automatic answering of user requests and sharing of building blocks across service offerings. In this paper, we propose an ontology-driven methodology for formal modeling of the service offerings and associated processes.

The Effects of Medicare Accountable Organizations on Inpatient Mortality Rates

Studies have linked Accountable Care Organizations (ACOs) to improved primary care, but there is little research on how ACOs affect care in other settings. We examined whether Medicare ACOs have improved hospital quality of care, specifically focusing on preventable inpatient mortality. We used 2008-2014 Healthcare Cost and Utilization Project hospital discharge data from 34 states’ Medicare ACO and non-ACO hospitals in conjunction with data from the American Hospital Association Annual Survey and the Survey of Care Systems and Payment. We estimated discharge-level logistic regression models that measured the relationship between ACO affiliation and mortality following admissions for acute myocardial infarction, abdominal aortic aneurysm (AAA) repair, coronary artery bypass grafting, and pneumonia, controlling for patient demographic mix, hospital, and year. Our results suggest that, on average, Medicare ACO hospitals are not associated with improved mortality rates for the studied IQI conditions. Stakeholders may potentially consider providing ACOs with incentives or designing new programs for ACOs to target inpatient mortality reductions.