Theo Lynn

A survey of Cloud monitoring tools: Taxonomy, capabilities and objectives

a b s t r a c t The efficient management of Cloud infrastructure and deployments is a topic that is currently attracting significant interest. Complex Cloud deployments can result in an intricate layered structure. Understanding the behaviour of these hierarchical systems and how to manage them optimally are challenging tasks that can be facilitated by pervasive monitoring. Monitoring tools and techniques have an important role to play in this area by gathering the information required to make informed decisions. A broad variety of monitoring tools are available, from general-purpose infrastructure monitoring tools that predate Cloud computing, to high-level application monitoring services that are themselves hosted in the Cloud. Surveying the capabilities of monitoring tools can identify the fitness of these tools in serving certain objectives. Monitoring tools are essential components to deal with various objectives of both Cloud providers and consumers in different Cloud operational areas. We have identified the practical capabilities that an ideal monitoring tool should possess to serve the objectives in these operational areas. Based on these identified capabilities, we present a taxonomy and analyse the monitoring tools to determine their strength and weaknesses. In conclusion, we present our reflections on the analysis, discuss challenges and identify future research trends in the area of Cloud monitoring.

CLOUDLIGHTNING: A Framework for a Self-organising and Self-managing Heterogeneous Cloud

As clouds increase in size and as machines of different types are added to the infrastructure in order to maximize performance and power efficiency, heterogeneous clouds are being created. However, exploiting different architectures poses significant challenges. To efficiently access heterogeneous resources and, at the same time, to exploit these resources to reduce application development effort, to make optimisations easier and to simplify service deployment, requires a re-evaluation of our approach to service delivery. We propose a novel cloud management and delivery architecture based on the principles of self-organisation and self-management that shifts the deployment and optimisation effort from the consumer to the software stack running on the cloud infrastructure. Our goal is to address inefficient use of resources and consequently to deliver savings to the cloud provider and consumer in terms of reduced power consumption and improved service delivery, with hyperscale systems particularly in mind. The framework is general but also endeavours to enable cloud services for high performance computing. Infrastructure-as-a-Service provision is the primary use case, however, we posit that genomics, oil and gas exploration, and ray tracing are three downstream use cases that will benefit from the proposed architecture.

Towards the Development of a Cloud Service Capability Assessment Framework

Considering the complexity of today’s service environment, Small-to-Medium sized Enterprises (SMEs) cannot afford to accept the status quo of service operations, and therefore, they must have some clear business analytics objectives to reach. Without clear metric objectives, organisations are almost destined for disaster since the allocation of resources may not have responded to the demand exerted from outside of the organisation. This is particularly true within a complex and rapidly changing cloud computing environment. The cloud dynamic ecosystem is moving toward a collection of services which interoperate across the Internet. This chapter offers a discussion on an approach to assessing cloud capabilities through cloud service capability assessment framework (CSCAF). Service metrics play a critical role in CSCAF that presents managers with a practical framework to carry out cloud capability assessments. The process may be simply described as publishing, retrieving, and managing cloud service descriptions, service publications which are matched with descriptions of consumer’s requirements and service matching.

#GazaUnderAttack: Twitter, Palestine and diffused war

Since Hamas took over Gaza in 2007 and Israel imposed a land, air and sea blockade, there has been continuous violence between the two sides. Since 2008, the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) have launc...

Development of a Cloud Trust Label: A Delphi Approach

ABSTRACT The purpose of this research is to identify the potential information components of an online, real-time trust label, which is proposed as a communication mechanism to encourage trust in cloud service providers and cloud computing products. An online Delphi process was used with 28 cloud computing experts (including vendors, software providers, and legal and business representatives). The proposed label contains 81 information components, covering the cloud service provider (e.g. physical location, legal jurisdiction), the cloud service itself (e.g. data location, security, backup, certification), and a historical service-level summary (e.g. uptime data, support response times). The potential benefits of such a label to encourage trustworthiness perceptions and trust behaviors in the cloud computing environment are explored. Limitations of the study are highlighted, and further research studies are suggested to test the concept of the label and to refine the components of the label itself.

The Role of Personal Factors in the Location Decision of Software Services Start-up Firms

Abstract This paper explores the factors which influence the business location decisions of start-ups, focusing in particular on the role of personal factors. Established explanations of industry location emphasize proximity to firms in the same or related industries and proximity to a wider set of business services, though recent research suggests that personal factors may play an important role in explanations of industry location—particularly in technology-enabled sectors. A survey of 97 new firms, founded between 2008 and 2012, in the Irish software services sector, shows that the business location decision is influenced by the personal motivation of entrepreneurs to attain a desired quality of life, and that this outweighs economic factors such as proximity to firms within the same or related industries, proximity to a broader set of supporting business services, infrastructure or the availability of government support schemes. Personal factors are particularly important to firms located outside the Dublin metropolitan area and to home-based businesses. This has important policy implications for national and regional governments seeking to encourage entrepreneurship in technology-enabled service sectors.

A review of cloud computing simulation platforms and related environments

Recent years have seen an increasing trend towards the development of Discrete Event Simulation (DES) platforms to support cloud computing related decision making and research. The complexity of cl ...

Quality Assurance for Open Source Software Configuration Management

Commonly used open source configuration management systems, such as Puppet, Chef and CFEngine, allow for system configurations to be expressed as scripts. A number of quality issues that may arise when executing these scripts are identified. An automated quality assurance service is proposed that identifies the presence of these issues by automatically executing scripts across a range of environments. Test results are automatically published to a format capable of being consumed by script catalogues and social coding sites. This would serve as an independent signal of script trustworthiness and quality to script consumers and would allow developers to be made quickly aware of quality issues. As a result, potential consumers of scripts can be assured that a script is likely to work when applied to their particular environment. Script developers can be notified of compatibility issues and take steps to address them.

A Trust Label System for Communicating Trust in Cloud Services

Cloud computing is rapidly changing the digital service landscape. A proliferation of Cloud providers has emerged, increasing the difficulty of consumer decisions. Trust issues have been identified as a factor holding back Cloud adoption. The risks and challenges inherent in the adoption of Cloud services are well recognised in the computing literature. In conjunction with these risks, the relative novelty of the online environment as a context for the provision of business services can increase consumer perceptions of uncertainty. This uncertainty is worsened in a Cloud context due to the lack of transparency, from the consumer perspective, into the service types, operational conditions and the quality of service offered by the diverse providers. Previous approaches failed to provide an appropriate medium for communicating trust and trustworthiness in Clouds. A new strategy is required to improve consumer confidence and trust in Cloud providers. This paper presents the operationalisation of a trust label system designed to communicate trust and trustworthiness in Cloud services. We describe the technical details and implementation of the trust label components. Based on a use case scenario, an initial evaluation was carried out to test its operations and its usefulness for increasing consumer trust in Cloud services.

Single system image

Single system image is a computing paradigm where a number of distributed computing resources are aggregated and presented via an interface that maintains the illusion of interaction with a single system. This approach encompasses decades of research using a broad variety of techniques at varying levels of abstraction, from custom hardware and distributed hypervisors to specialized operating system kernels and user-level tools. Existing classification schemes for SSI technologies are reviewed, and an updated classification scheme is proposed. A survey of implementation techniques is provided along with relevant examples. Notable deployments are examined and insights gained from hands-on experience are summarized. Issues affecting the adoption of kernel-level SSI are identified and discussed in the context of technology adoption literature. We provide a retrospective survey of single system image.There has been novel recent work in the area of distributed hypervisors.Despite a peak in interest in the 2000s, kernel-level SSI has not been widely adopted.There may be a role in the future for virtualized kernel-level SSI clusters.