Tim Waizenegger

Policy4TOSCA: A Policy-Aware Cloud Service Provisioning Approach to Enable Secure Cloud Computing

With the growing adoption of Cloud Computing, automated deployment and provisioning systems for Cloud applications are becoming more prevalent. They help to reduce the onboarding costs for new customers as well as the financial impact of managing Cloud Services by automating these previously manual tasks. With the widespread use of such systems, the adoption of a common standard for describing Cloud applications will provide a crucial advantage by enabling reusable and portable applications. TOSCA, a newly published standard by OASIS with broad industry participation provides this opportunity. Besides the technical requirements of running and managing applications in the cloud, non-functional requirements, like cost, security, and environmental issues, are of special importance when moving towards the automated provisioning and management of Cloud applications. In this paper we demonstrate how non-functional requirements are defined in TOSCA using policies. We propose a mechanism for automatic processing of these formal policy definitions in a TOSCA runtime environment that we have developed based on the proposed architecture of the TOSCA primer. In order to evaluate our approach, we present prototypical implementations of security policies for encrypting databases and for limiting the geographical location of the Cloud servers. We demonstrate how our runtime environment is ensuring these policies and show how they affect the deployment of the application.

Dynamic cloud service topology adaption for minimizing resources while meeting performance goals

Even in the cloud computing era, meeting service-level agreements (SLAs) of a computing service or application while significantly reducing the total cost of ownership (TCO) remains a challenge. Cloud and software defined environments (SDEs) are offering new opportunities for how resources can be utilized to an even higher degree than before--which leads to a reduced TCO for service providers and customers of a service. The traditional method of meeting an SLA is to assess peak workloads and size a system accordingly. This still leads to very low average compute resource utilization rates. This paper presents a novel dynamic and cost-efficient orchestration approach of multitenant capable, software defined system topologies based on a monitor-analyze-plan-execute (MAPE) concept. We present the mechanism involved in creating and applying these heuristics and show the results for a cloud-based enterprise content management (ECM) solution. Our approach allows the cloud provider to minimize its resource requirements while staying in compliance with SLAs.

The First Data Science Challenge at BTW 2017

The 17th Conference on Database Systems for Business, Technology, and Web (BTW2017) of the German Informatics Society (GI) took place in March 2017 at the University of Stuttgart in Germany. A Data Science Challenge was organized for the first time at a BTW conference by the University of Stuttgart and Sponsor IBM. We challenged the participants to solve a data analysis task within one month and present their results at the BTW. In this article, we give an overview of the organizational process surrounding the Challenge, and introduce the task that the participants had to solve. In the subsequent sections, the final four competitor groups describe their approaches and results.