Failure-aware resource provisioning for hybrid Cloud infrastructure

Hybrid Cloud computing is receiving increasing attention in recent days. In order to realize the full potential of the hybrid Cloud platform, an architectural framework for efficiently coupling public and private Clouds is necessary. As resource failures due to the increasing functionality and complexity of hybrid Cloud computing are inevitable, a failure-aware resource provisioning algorithm that is capable of attending to the end-users quality of service (QoS) requirements is paramount. In this paper, we propose a scalable hybrid Cloud infrastructure as well as resource provisioning policies to assure QoS targets of the users. The proposed policies take into account the workload model and the failure correlations to redirect users’ requests to the appropriate Cloud providers. Using real failure traces and a workload model, we evaluate the proposed resource provisioning policies to demonstrate their performance, cost as well as performance–cost efficiency. Simulation results reveal that in a realistic working condition while adopting user estimates for the requests in the provisioning policies, we are able to improve the users’ QoS about 32% in terms of deadline violation rate and 57% in terms of slowdown with a limited cost on a public Cloud.     

Two-channel user authentication by using USB on Cloud

According to parallel computing technology, Cloud service is popular, and it is easy to use Cloud service at everywhere. Cloud means involving application systems that are executed within the cloud and operated via the internet enabled devices. Cloud computing does not rely on the use of cloud storage as it will be removed upon users download action. Clouds can be classified as public, private and hybrid. Cloud service comes up with Ubiquitous; Cloud service users can use their service at anywhere at any time. It is convenient. However, there is a tradeoff. If user’s username and password are compromised, user’s cloud system is in danger, and their confidential information will be in jeopardy. At anywhere and anytime with any device, Cloud user’s credential could be in jeopardy. Security concerns in Cloud play a major role. It is the biggest obstacle to developing in Cloud. However, Cloud is still popular and vulnerability for hacking because of one channel user authentication. Therefore, this research proposes two-channel user authentication by using USB to emphasise security.     

Designing universal access: web-applications for the elderly and disabled

Throughout a person’s life they are likely to experience some degree of impairment. What must be ensured is that these individuals can benefit from the opportunities afforded by technology in the same way as those who are able bodied. With the Internet becoming an increasingly popular medium for organizations to deliver information and services to the public many of these technological benefits are provided through web applications. However, due to possible visual, physical or cognitive impairments, older users and those with disabilities are more likely to experience difficulties. This paper addresses issues relating to usability of web applications for elderly and disabled users and investigates ways in which it can be improved, and whether doing so will affect usability for younger and more able users. Results from experiments undertaken indicated that it was possible to develop a web application for elderly and disabled users without degrading usability for other users.     

Perceived usefulness,personal experiences,risk perception and trust as determinants of adoption of e-government services in The Netherlands

Recently Dutch government, as well as many other governments around the world, has digitized a major portion of its public services. With this development electronic services finally arrive at the transaction level. The risks of electronic services on the transactional level are more profound than at the informational level. The public needs to trust the integrity and ‘information management capacities’ of the government or other involved organizations, as well as trust the infrastructure and those managing the infrastructure. In this process, the individual citizen will have to decide to adopt the new electronic government services by weighing its benefits and risks. In this paper, we present a study which aims to identify the role of risk perception and trust in the intention to adopt government e-services.     

Policing as a Service in the Cloud

ABSTRACT

Security and privacy are fundamental concerns in cloud computing both in terms of legal complications and user trust. Cloud computing is a new computing paradigm, aiming to provide reliable, customized, and guaranteed computing dynamic environment for end users. However, the existing security and privacy issues in the cloud still present a strong barrier for users to adopt cloud computing solutions. This paper investigates the security and privacy challenges in cloud computing in order to explore methods that improve the users’ trust in the adaptation of the cloud. Policing as a Service can be offered by the cloud providers with the intention of empowering users to monitor and guard their assets in the cloud. This service is beneficial both to the cloud providers and the users. However, at first, the cloud providers may only be able to offer basic auditing services due to undeveloped tools and applications. Similar to other services delivered in the cloud, users can purchase this service to gain some control over their data. The subservices of the proposed service can be Privacy as a Service and Forensics as a Service. These services give users a sense of transparency and control over their data in the cloud while better security and privacy safeguards are sought.     

Cloud providers viability

A major part of the commercial Internet is moving toward the cloud paradigm. This phenomenon has a drastic impact on the organizational structures of enterprizes and introduces new challenges that must be properly addressed to avoid major setbacks. One such challenge is that of cloud provider viability, that is, the reasonable certainty that the Cloud Service Provider (CSP) will not go out of business, either by filing for bankruptcy or by simply shutting down operations, thus leaving its customers stranded without an infrastructure and, depending on the type of cloud service used, even without their applications or data. This article attempts to address the issue of cloud provider viability, defining a possible way of modeling viability as a non-functional requirement and proposing some approaches that can be used to mitigate the problem, both from a technical and from a legal perspective. By introducing a structured perspective into the topic of cloud viability, describing the risks, factors and possible mitigators, the contribution of this work is twofold: it gives the customer a better understanding to determine when it can rely on the cloud infrastructure on the long term and what precautions it should take in any case, and provides the CSP with means to address some of the viability issues and thus increase its customers’ trust.     

Environment-conscious scheduling of HPC applications on distributed Cloud-oriented data centers

The use of High Performance Computing (HPC) in commercial and consumer IT applications is becoming popular. HPC users need the ability to gain rapid and scalable access to high-end computing capabilities. Cloud computing promises to deliver such a computing infrastructure using data centers so that HPC users can access applications and data from a Cloud anywhere in the world on demand and pay based on what they use. However, the growing demand drastically increases the energy consumption of data centers, which has become a critical issue. High energy consumption not only translates to high energy cost which will reduce the profit margin of Cloud providers, but also high carbon emissions which are not environmentally sustainable. Hence, there is an urgent need for energy-efficient solutions that can address the high increase in the energy consumption from the perspective of not only the Cloud provider, but also from the environment. To address this issue, we propose near-optimal scheduling policies that exploit heterogeneity across multiple data centers for a Cloud provider. We consider a number of energy efficiency factors (such as energy cost, carbon emission rate, workload, and CPU power efficiency) which change across different data centers depending on their location, architectural design, and management system. Our carbon/energy based scheduling policies are able to achieve on average up to 25% of energy savings in comparison to profit based scheduling policies leading to higher profit and less carbon emissions.     

Toward support for hypermedia on the World Wide Web

As organizations rush to embrace the World Wide Web as their primary application infrastructure, they should not bypass the benefit of hypermedia support. The Web's infrastructure can serve as an interface to all interactive applications and, over time, will become the graphical user interface model for new applications. Ubiquitous hypermedia support should become the jewel of the Web environment. Through Web integration, hypermedia could become an integral part of every interactive application. With the proper tools to support hypermedia in Web application development, it will become second nature for developers and individual authors to provide supplemental links and hypermedia navigation. However, as organizations adopt the Web as their primary application infrastructure, designers may use Java and other tools to recreate current application functionality, and not take advantage of the Web's hypermedia-augmented infrastructure. If users, designers, MIS departments and organizations don't demand hypermedia support, hypermedia may get lost in the frenzy of Web integration     

The challenges that XML faces

Proponents have promoted XML as a revolutionary replacement for HTML that will add semantics to Web technology; let users, devices and applications on different platforms communicate across the Internet; and permit organizations to integrate different data types within their systems. Indeed, organizations have developed many XML-based applications, including the Chemical Markup Language, Commerce XML, MathML, VoiceXML and the Bioinformatic Sequence Markup Language. Meanwhile, users have widely adopted the language. However, XML still faces two significant challenges. First, users have developed so many flavors of XML that there is now concern that the diverse versions won't work together properly over the Web, thereby defeating one of the technology's purposes. Second, the characteristics that make the language effective also pose potentially significant security problems. Researchers and standards organizations are working to overcome these hurdles, but the challenges are significant     

基于虚拟组织的桌面云安全访问与共享机制研究

采用云计算技术实现托管式的虚拟桌面一般被称为桌面云。近年来桌面云被认为是云计算最为成熟的应用之一,本文着重研究桌面云安全访问与共享机制。我们使用基于PKI的证书认证建立了虚拟组织,在其上重点研究了虚拟机的创建,远程桌面访问,共享等应用。证书认证等机制可以使得访问更加安全可靠。而通过虚拟组织的信任关系,多个用户可以共享同一个虚拟机。为了确保远程通道的安全,我们采用了OpenVPN来构建虚拟专用网络,对虚拟机的使用者进行认证并对通信进行加密保护。     

TIRIAC: A trust-driven risk-aware access control framework for Grid environments

The infrastructure provided by a Grid enables researchers to collaboratively solve various research problems through sharing their resources and establishing virtual organizations (VOs). However, the distributed and dynamic nature of a Grid VO is a challenge for access control systems. All users in a VO have responsibilities which correspond to their rights. While they should be able to make use of all VO resources, irresponsibility and permission misuse (insider attack) impose costs and losses on the affected resources. Hence, the history of users’ behavior and the possibility of misuse need to be considered in the resource providers’ risk management process. In this paper, we propose the TIRIAC framework for Grid access control. TIRIAC is the first trust-driven risk-aware access control framework which uses obligations to seamlessly monitor users and mitigate risks. In the TIRIAC framework, trust evaluation and risk management are added to the base Grid access control services. Thereafter, site administrators can explicitly specify users’ responsibilities in form of obligations alongside access control rules. In addition, obligation-specific policies can be specified to mitigate risks according to their severity. We study the adoption of our framework by the European Grid Infrastructure (EGI), and demonstrate its superiority in comparison with the related work using multiple criteria. Moreover, we evaluate the performance of the framework and demonstrate its scalability in simulation experiments.     

Safeguarding Cloud Computing Infrastructure: A Security Analysis

Cloud computing is the provision of hosted resources, comprising software, hardware and processing over the World Wide Web. The advantages of rapid deployment, versatility, low expenses and scalability have led to the widespread use of cloud computing across organizations of all sizes, mostly as a component of the combination/multi-cloud infrastructure structure. While cloud storage offers significant benefits as well as cost-effective alternatives for IT management and expansion, new opportunities and challenges in the context of security vulnerabilities are emerging in this domain. Cloud security, also recognized as cloud computing security, refers to a collection of policies, regulations, systematic processes that function together to secure cloud infrastructure systems. These security procedures are designed to safeguard cloud data, to facilitate regulatory enforcement and to preserve the confidentiality of consumers, as well as to lay down encryption rules for specific devices and applications. This study presents an overview of the innovative cloud computing and security challenges that exist at different levels of cloud infrastructure. In this league, the present research work would be a significant contribution in reducing the security attacks on cloud computing so as to provide sustainable and secure services.     

In Clouds Shall We Trust?

Cloud computing will become ubiquitous, but what we can do to improve our ability to provide users and providers of cloud computing with trust in the software services and infrastructure that make up the cloud. In this article we touch on issues of the transparency, changing expectations and uses, architecture, and amorphous nature of cloud computing.     

EMUSIM: an integrated emulation and simulation environment for modeling,evaluation, and validation of performance of Cloud computing applications

Cloud computing allows the deployment and delivery of application services for users worldwide. Software as a Service providers with limited upfront budget can take advantage of Cloud computing and lease the required capacity in a pay‐as‐you‐go basis, which also enables flexible and dynamic resource allocation according to service demand. One key challenge potential Cloud customers have before renting resources is to know how their services will behave in a set of resources and the costs involved when growing and shrinking their resource pool. Most of the studies in this area rely on simulation‐based experiments, which consider simplified modeling of applications and computing environment. In order to better predict service's behavior on Cloud platforms, we developed an integrated architecture that is based on both simulation and emulation. The proposed architecture, named EMUSIM, automatically extracts information from application behavior via emulation and then uses this information to generate the corresponding simulation model. We performed experiments using an image processing application as a case study and found that EMUSIM was able to accurately model such application via emulation and use the model to supply information about its potential performance in a Cloud provider. We also discuss our experience using EMUSIM for deploying applications in a real public Cloud provider. EMUSIM is based on an open source software stack and therefore it can be extended for analysis behavior of several other applications. Copyright © 2012 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

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

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.     

Editorial for FGCS special issue: Big Data in the cloud

Research associated with Big Data in the Cloud will be important topic over the next few years. The topic includes work on demonstrating architectures, applications, services, experiments and simulations in the Cloud to support the cases related to adoption of Big Data. A common approach to Big Data in the Cloud to allow better access, performance and efficiency when analysing and understanding the data is to deliver Everything as a Service. Organisations adopting Big Data this way find the boundaries between private clouds, public clouds and Internet of Things (IoT) can be very thin. Volume, variety, velocity, veracity and value are the major factors in Big Data systems but there are other challenges to be resolved.The papers of this special issue address a variety of issues and concerns in Big Data, including: searching and processing Big Data, implementing and modelling event and workflow systems, visualisation modelling and simulation and aspects of social media.     

Dynamic application placement in the Mobile Cloud Network

To meet the challenges of consistent performance, low communication latency, and a high degree of user mobility, cloud and Telecom infrastructure vendors and operators foresee a Mobile Cloud Network that incorporates public cloud infrastructures with cloud augmented Telecom nodes in forthcoming mobile access networks. A Mobile Cloud Network is composed of distributed cost- and capacity-heterogeneous resources that host applications that in turn are subject to a spatially and quantitatively rapidly changing demand. Such an infrastructure requires a holistic management approach that ensures that the resident applications’ performance requirements are met while sustainably supported by the underlying infrastructure. The contribution of this paper is three-fold. Firstly, this paper contributes with a model that captures the cost- and capacity-heterogeneity of a Mobile Cloud Network infrastructure. The model bridges the Mobile Edge Computing and Distributed Cloud paradigms by modelling multiple tiers of resources across the network and serves not just mobile devices but any client beyond and within the network. A set of resource management challenges is presented based on this model. Secondly, an algorithm that holistically and optimally solves these challenges is proposed. The algorithm is formulated as an application placement method that incorporates aspects of network link capacity, desired user latency and user mobility, as well as data centre resource utilisation and server provisioning costs. Thirdly, to address scalability, a tractable locally optimal algorithm is presented. The evaluation demonstrates that the placement algorithm significantly improves latency, resource utilisation skewness while minimising the operational cost of the system. Additionally, the proposed model and evaluation method demonstrate the viability of dynamic resource management of the Mobile Cloud Network and the need for accommodating rapidly mobile demand in a holistic manner.     

云计算:系统实例与研究现状

针对云计算这样一个范畴综述了当前云计算所采用的技术,剖析其背后的技术含义以及当前云计算参与企业所采用的云计算实现方案.云计算包含两个方面的含义:一方面是底层构建的云计算平台基础设施,是用来构造上层应用程序的基础;另外一方面是构建在这个基础平台之上的云计算应用程序.主要是针对云计算的基础架构的研究与实现状况给出综述,对于云计算的应用也有所涉及.云计算有3个最基本的特征:第1个是基础设施架构在大规模的廉价服务器集群之上;第二是应用程序与底层服务协作开发,最大限度地利用资源;第3个是通过多个廉价服务器之间的冗余,通过软件获得高可用性.云计算达到了两个分布式计算的重要目标:可扩展性和高可用性.可扩展性表达了云计算能够无缝地扩展到大规模的集群之上,甚至包含数千个节点同时处理.高可用性代表了云计算能够容忍节点的错误,甚至有很大一部分节点发生失效也不会影响程序的正确运行.通过此文可以了解云计算的当前发展状况以及未来的研究趋势.     

基于Citrix的云桌面方案

由于传统IT网络架构不相同,移动办公日渐增多,远程的管理和维护也更加困难,提出一种基于Citrix的云桌面解决方案,该方案对用户终端设备统一管理维护,使桌面系统和应用安全可靠,降低了桌面系统的运行与维护成本,满足企业对桌面的集中管理;同时,云桌面给用户提供了个性化的桌面,随时随地多样的访问方式,提升了桌面系统的服务水平和业务连续性需求;与传统的IT架构比较表明,该方案通过集中管理、存储隔离和远程接入访问控制等技术,以更快的速度、更高的可预测性以及更优的性能价格比,为更多的访问者提供更丰富的应用,在节能减排方面的尤为突出,能极大地降低耗能、节约成本.     

Staring at Clouds

Cloud computing's premise is to lower computing costs by providing computational resources in a shared infrastructure. This could be a godsend to smaller organizations, but interoperability and security challenges still exist for this emerging technology.