Stefan Pappe

Software defined environments: an introduction

During the past few years, enterprises have been increasingly aggressive in moving mission-critical and performance-sensitive applications to the cloud, while at the same time many new mobile, social, and analytics applications are directly developed and operated on cloud computing platforms. These two movements are encouraging the shift of the value proposition of cloud computing from cost reduction to simultaneous agility and optimization. These requirements (agility and optimization) are driving the recent disruptive trend of software defined computing, for which the entire computing infrastructure--compute, storage and network--is becoming software defined and dynamically programmable. The key elements within software defined environments include capability-based resource abstraction, goal-based and policy-based workload definition, and outcome-based continuous mapping of the workload to the available resources. Furthermore, software defined environments provide the tooling and capabilities to compose workloads from existing components that are then continuously and autonomously mapped onto the underlying programmable infrastructure. These elements enable software defined environments to achieve agility, efficiency, and continuous outcome-optimized provisioning and management, plus continuous assurance for resiliency and security. This paper provides an overview and introduction to the key elements and challenges of software defined environments.

Open commit protocols tolerating commission failures

To ensure atomicity of transactions in distributed systems so-called 2-phase commit (2PC) protocols have been proposed. The basic assumption of these protocols is that the processing nodes involved in transactions are “sane,” i.e., they only fail with omission failures, and nodes eventually recover from failures. Unfortunately, this assumption is not realistic for so-called Open Distributed Systems (ODSs), in which nodes may have totally different reliability characteristics. In ODSs, nodes can be classified into trusted nodes (e.g., a banking server) and nontrusted nodes (e.g., a home PC requesting a remote banking service). While trusted nodes are assumed to be sane, nontrusted nodes may fail permanently and even cause commission failures to occur. In this paper, we propose a family of 2PC protocols that tolerate any number of omission failures at trusted nodes and any number of commission and omission failures at nontrusted nodes. The proposed protocols ensure that (at least) the trusted nodes participating in a transaction eventually terminate the transaction in a consistent manner. Unlike Byzantine commit protocols, our protocols do not incorporate mechanisms for achieving Byzantine agreement, which has advantages in terms of complexity: Our protocols have the same or only a slightly higher message complexity than traditional 2PC protocols.

Evolution of the IBM cloud: enabling an enterprise cloud services ecosystem

Cloud computing is a new paradigm that is transforming the information technology (IT) industry and reshaping the way enterprise services are developed, deployed, sold, delivered, and consumed. Instead of managing complex IT systems, customers can focus on the core competence of their enterprise while obtaining all required IT functions as a service. From the perspective of a cloud provider, remaining competitive and realizing full potential of economies of scale that the cloud paradigm promises require extreme levels of standardization, automation, and optimization. This paper describes the evolution of the Common Cloud Management Platform (CCMP), a management system providing business and operations support for cloud services. We cover its initial implementation and applications, discuss the latest challenges faced when adapting enterprise solutions to the cloud, and introduce the exploratory research topics to which this work led. We address the business services aspects, including framework-based integration of the catalog, and customer and revenue management, as well as the operational aspects, including novel approaches for scalable virtual machine provisioning and adaptive workload placement optimization. We discuss architecture, design, and implementation details of key CCMP components and highlight the challenging aspects of providing such architecture while promoting scalability, modularity, and reuse.

Open commit protocols for the tree of processes model

The authors propose three different two-phase commit (2PC) protocols that ensure that, even in the presence of permanent node failures, all sane nodes participating in a particular transaction eventually terminate the transaction in a consistent way. A node is defined to be sane if it eventually recovers from failures. These protocols, called open 2PC protocols, are based on a tree-of-processes model and provide means for transferring the coordinator function within process trees. Besides describing the open 2PC protocols in detail, the authors compare these protocols with regard to their message and time complexity. They also include a discussion of related work.<<ETX>>

Architectural Knowledge in an SOA Infrastructure Reference Architecture

In this chapter, we present an industrial case study for the creation and usage of architectural knowledge. We first introduce the business domain, service portfolio, and knowledge management approach of the company involved in the case. Next, we introduce a Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) infrastructure reference architecture as a primary carrier of architectural knowledge in this company. Moreover, we present how we harvested architectural knowledge from industry projects to create this reference architecture. We also present feedback from early reference architecture users. Finally, we conclude and give an outlook to future work.

Datenbankzugriff in offenen Rechnernetzen

Nach einer Einfuhrung in zentrale und verteilte Datenbanksysteme und die Kommunikation in offenen Systemen wird die Einbettung eines Datenbank-FernzugrifTs in das ISO-Referenzmodell beschrieben. Ein solcher FernzugrifT ermoglicht die Kommunikation zwischen einem Anwendungsprogramm und einem entfernten Datenbanksystem in einem heterogenen Rechnernetz. Die aktuellen Normungsvorschlage der ECMA zu diesem Thema werden vorgestellt. Abschliesend wird uber einen Implementierungsansatz fur einen Prototyp berichtet.

Database Access in Open Systems

After a short introduction into centralized and distributed database systems and communication in open systems, the integration of a Remote Database Access facility into the ISO Reference Model is described. Such a facility provides a communication path between an application program and a remote database system in a heterogeneous network. The current standard proposals of ECMA are introduced. Finally, the status of a prototype implementation is reported.

Specification and implementation of a standard for remote database access

Modern office information systems are increasingly distributed systems of heterogeneous, administrative organizational units. In general, in such systems data is held at different locations, not necessarily identical with the place at which the data is accessed and/or manipulated. There is an increasing need to access remote data without regard to computer boundaries, architectures and software specifies, thus making application programs independent of a specific database. In general, such communication requirements are addressed by standards efforts of ISO for ‘Open Systems Interconnection’ (OSI) and, in particular, by efforts of standardizing the ‘Remote Database Access’ (RDA).

OSI Services for Transaction Processing

This paper presents and discusses the approaches taken by the ‘International Standard Organization’ (ISO) for supporting transaction oriented applications in open systems. The paper is based on the documents available January 1987. In the ISO reference model for ‘Open System Interconnection’ application-specific communication support is located in the application layer (7). The paper concentrates on the structure and main components of that part of the model and especially on services which support transaction processing in distributed applications. On the basis of a specific transaction oriented application we discuss the use of different approaches. We conclude the paper with some comments on the current situation in ISO OSI transaction processing standard development.

Cloud Computing Roundtable

In this issue of IEEE Cloud Computing, EIC Mazin Yousif chats with cloud experts from Cisco, Shell, IBM, and Microsoft about directions in cloud computing through 2020. They discuss a range of issues, from standards and compliance, to security and privacy, to the role of open source.