Roland Kübert

Building a Service-Oriented Monitoring Framework with REST and Nagios

Over the past years services computing has become an emerging science that is highly regarded as a necessary technology not only by research but by industry as well. In the same context, the advent of cloud computing gave to services and web applications a whole new perspective and potential. Regardless of the rapid evolution in the fields of services and web technologies, ensuring the QoS of computing resources still remains an important topic. To this end, monitoring computing resources and application execution is an integral part of the services computing value chain. In this paper we present the architectural design and implementation of a service framework that monitors the resources of a physical as well as virtual infrastructure. Our solution extends Nagios, a widely used monitoring toolkit, through the implementation of NEB2REST, a Restful Event Brokering module.

A RESTful implementation of the WS-agreement specification

Representational State Transfer (REST) is an architectural style for distributed systems. RESTful web services have been gaining popularity in the last years. The Java API for RESTful Web Services (JAX-RS) has been specified as Java Specification Request 311 and is therefore an official part of Java; with the Jersey framework, a robust reference implementation of the specification exists. We examine in how far RESTful web services can fulfill tasks that have been defined as WS-* specifications. In particular, we investigate how a RESTful design and implementation of the WS-Agreement specification can be realized, presenting a light-weight approach to the creation and management of service level agreements.

Service level agreements for job control in high-performance computing

A key element for outsourcing critical parts of a business process in Service Oriented Architectures are Service Level Agreements (SLAs). They build the key element to move from solely trust-based towards controlled cross-organizational collaboration. While originating from the domain of telecommunications the SLA concept has gained particular attention for Grid computing environments. Significant focus has been given so far to automated negotiation and agreement (also considering legal constraints) of SLAs between parties. However, how a provider that has agreed to a certain SLA is able to map and implement this on its own physical resources or on the ones provided by collaboration partners is not well covered. In this paper we present an approach for a High Performance Computing (HPC) service provider to organize its job submission and scheduling control through long-term SLAs.

The network aspect of Infrastructure-as-a-Service

Current service platform offers that provide Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) do not adequately meet the requirements expressed by interactive real-time services. Online application response times can not yet be enforced in virtual infrastructures without service level objectives (SLOs) that meet virtual machine interconnection constraints. This paper presents a framework spanning from the service description model over the IaaS platform interface for service level agreement (SLA) negotiation to the management of virtual network resources in an IaaS environment.

An Integrated Monitoring Infrastructure for Cloud Environments

As Cloud Computing evolves to becoming a major technological paradigm of our times, topics like Quality of Service (QoS) assurance and resource monitoring will remain active fields of investigation and research. Mechanisms that will allow the Consumers as well as the Providers to monitor the operation of the application into the Cloud or the Cloud itself are of great importance for the long-term adoption of this technology. In this paper we propose an architectural solution of an integrated monitoring infrastructure for Cloud environments. The mechanism is based on a multi-level design of a collection as well as a management layer. The collection functionality supports information coming from the physical, virtual and service infrastructures. By exploiting open source APIs combined with custom components we have come up with a generic yet efficient solution, applicable to public, private and hybrid Cloud scenarios.

A Path Supervision Framework A Key for Service Monitoring in Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) Platforms

current service platforms, e.g. Cloud solutions, do not adequately address the requirements exposed from certain kind of services like real-time services. Infrastructure as a Service Platform (IaaS) supporting these service requirements, such as quality of service of the resources provided, heavily depend on measurements in order to be able to verify that the quality of service as contracted in a service level agreement (SLA) towards the IaaS platform is kept on service layer. This paper presents the concept of a path supervision framework in the context of virtualized service infrastructures, such as IaaS platforms, spanning over use cases for service monitoring and measurement methodology. Moreover, the overall monitoring framework supporting the guaranteed execution of real-time services in such an execution environment is presented.

High Performance Computing as a Service with Service Level Agreements

Cloud computing has been gaining popularity for quite some time in various areas, on the infrastructure, platform and application level. Recently, the possibility to provide high performance computing (HPC) as a service has been investigated in conjunction with the cloud computing paradigm. While this is a viable solution for applications that do not require HPC in the truest sense -- with supercomputers which offer paramount performance regarding computation, network interconnect and storage -- there are HPC applications which cannot be realized in this way. HPC as a service can be offered for these applications as well, but it requires a different approach than the usage of cloud computing. The enhancement of mostly best effort based HPC with long-term service level agreements (SLAs) is a potential solution. HPC providers then need not only to decide on which service levels to offer but need to closely investigate the framework conditions for these service levels. The scheduling of these service levels is a difficult task and we simulate a proposed algorithm for providing guarantees on waiting times and the implications on other jobs. We investigate the influence of setting a maximum allowed job size on prioritized jobs and conclude that it makes sense to restrict this size for both clients and provider.

Using Free Software for Elastic Web Hosting on a Private Cloud

Even though public cloud providers already exist and offer computing and storage services, cloud computing is still a buzzword for scientists in various fields such as engineering, finance, social sciences, etc. These technologies are currently mature enough to leave the experimental laboratory in order to be used in real-life scenarios. To this end, the authors consider that the prime example use case of cloud computing is a web hosting service. This paper presents the architectural approach as well as the technical solution for applying elastic web hosting onto a private cloud infrastructure using only free software. Through several available software applications and tools, anyone can build their own private cloud on top of a local infrastructure and benefit from the dynamicity and scalability provided by the cloud approach.