Mechanisms for SLA provisioning in cloud-based service providers

A challenge in cloud resource management is to design self-adaptable solutions capable to react to unpredictable workload fluctuations and changing utility principles. This paper analyzes the problem from the perspective of an Application Service Provider (ASP) that uses a cloud infrastructure to achieve scalable provisioning of its services in the respect of QoS constraints.First we draw a taxonomy of IaaS provider and use the identified features to drive the design of four autonomic service management architectures differing on the degree of control an ASP have on the system. We implemented two of this solutions and related mechanism to test five different resource provisioning policies. The implemented testbed has been evaluated under a realistic workload based on Wikipedia access traces on Amazon EC2 platform.The experimental evaluation performed confirms that: the proposed policies are capable to properly dimension the system resources making the whole system self-adaptable respect to the workload fluctuation. Moreover, having full control over the resource management plan allow to save up to the 32% of resource allocation cost always in the respect of SLA constraints.     

Matrix based proactive resource provisioning in mobile cloud environment

Mobile cloud computing is a dynamic, virtually scalable and network based computing environment where mobile device acts as a thin client and applications run on remote cloud servers. Mobile cloud computing resources required by different users depend on their respective personalized applications. Therefore, efficient resource provisioning in mobile clouds is an important aspect that needs special attention in order to make the mobile cloud computing a highly optimized entity. This paper proposes an adaptive model for efficient resource provisioning in mobile clouds by predicting and storing resource usages in a two dimensional matrix termed as resource provisioning matrix. These resource provisioning matrices are further used by an independent authority to predict future required resources using artificial neural network. Independent authority also checks and verifies resource usage bill computed by cloud service provider using resource provisioning matrices. It provides cost computation reliability for mobile customers in mobile cloud environment. Proposed model is implemented on Hadoop using three different applications. Results indicate that proposed model provides better mobile cloud resources utilization as well as maintains quality of service for mobile customer. Proposed model increases battery life of mobile device and decreases data usage cost for mobile customer.     

采用随机规划模型的云资源分配算法

针对云资源提供问题,为了降低云消费者的资源使用成本,提出了一种采用随机规划模型的云资源分配算法.同时考虑按需实例和预留实例,采用两阶段随机整数规划对云资源提供问题进行建模,在资源预留阶段,根据长期的工作负载情况,确定预留实例的类型和数量,在按需分配阶段,根据当前的工作负载,确定动态分配的按需实例的类型和数量.采用抽样平均近似方法减少资源提供问题的场景数量,降低求解复杂度,并提出了一种基于阶段分解的混合进化算法求解资源提供问题.仿真实验结果表明,采用随机规划模型的云资源分配算法能够在较短时间内获得近似最优的云资源预留方案,有效降低了云消费者的资源使用成本.     

A cost‐efficient resource provisioning algorithm for DHT‐based cloud storage systems

Personal cloud storage provides users with convenient data access services. Service providers build distributed storage systems by utilizing cloud resources with distributed hash table (DHT), so as to enhance system scalability. Efficient resource provisioning could not only guarantee service performance, but help providers to save cost. However, the interactions among servers in a DHT‐based cloud storage system depend on the routing process, which makes its execution logic more complicated than traditional multi‐tier applications. In addition, production data centers often comprise heterogeneous machines with different capacities. Few studies have fully considered the heterogeneity of cloud resources, which brings new challenges to resource provisioning. To address these challenges, this paper presents a novel resource provisioning model for service providers. The model utilizes queuing network for analysis of both service performance and cost estimation. Then, the problem is defined as a cost optimization with performance constraints. We propose a cost‐efficient algorithm to decompose the original problem into a sub‐optimization one. Furthermore, we implement a prototype system on top of an infrastructure platform built with OpenStack. It has been deployed in our campus network. Based on real‐world traces collected from our system and Dropbox, we validate the efficiency of our proposed algorithms by extensive experiments. Copyright © 2016 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

云计算下基于CRP算法的资源提供策略

云计算资源管理系统是用于接收来自云计算用户的资源请求,并且把特定的资源封装为服务提供给资源请求者。在云计算环境下,如何为资源请求者选择合适的资源是一个值得研究的课题。文中通过对云计算下现有的资源提供策略的分析,同时根据不同云提供者提供的计算资源的成本不同的特点,综合考虑资源的计算能力、可靠性和单位成本三点因素,提出了云计算下基于CRP算法的资源提供策略。这种资源提供策略既能提供满足用户资源请求的服务,也能降低云服务提供者的运营成本,从而获得更大收益。     

面向云应用系统的容错即服务优化提供方法

通过提供高效且持续可用的容错服务以保障云应用系统的可靠运行是至关重要的.采用容错即服务的模式,提出了一种优化的云容错服务动态提供方法,从云应用组件的可靠性及响应时间等方面描述云应用容错需求,以常用的复制、检查点和NVP（N-version programming）等容错技术为基础,充分考虑容错服务动态切换开销,分别针对支撑容错服务的底层云资源是否足够的场景,给出可用容错即服务提供方案的最优化求解方法.实验结果表明,所提方法降低了云应用系统支付的容错服务费用及支撑容错服务的底层云资源的开销,提高了容错服务提供商为多个云应用实施高效、可靠容错即服务的能力.     

An efficient resource provisioning approach for analyzing cloud workloads: a metaheuristic-based clustering approach

With the recent advancements in Internet-based computing models, the usage of cloud-based applications to facilitate daily activities is significantly increasing and is expected to grow further. Since the submitted workloads by users to use the cloud-based applications are different in terms of quality of service (QoS) metrics, it requires the analysis and identification of these heterogeneous cloud workloads to provide an efficient resource provisioning solution as one of the challenging issues to be addressed. In this study, we present an efficient resource provisioning solution using metaheuristic-based clustering mechanism to analyze cloud workloads. The proposed workload clustering approach used a combination of the genetic algorithm and fuzzy C-means technique to find similar clusters according to the user’s QoS requirements. Then, we used a gray wolf optimizer technique to make an appropriate scaling decision to provide the cloud resources for serving of cloud workloads. Besides, we design an extended framework to show interaction between users, cloud providers, and resource provisioning broker in the workload clustering process. The simulation results obtained under real workloads indicate that the proposed approach is efficient in terms of CPU utilization, elasticity, and the response time compared with the other approaches.

     

A fault‐tolerant dynamic scheduling method on hierarchical mobile edge cloud computing

Mobile edge cloud computing has been a promising computing paradigm, where mobile users could offload their application workloads to low‐latency local edge cloud resources. However, compared with remote public cloud resources, conventional local edge cloud resources are limited in computation capacity, especially when serve large number of mobile applications. To deal with this problem, we present a hierarchical edge cloud architecture to integrate the local edge clouds and public clouds so as to improve the performance and scalability of scheduling problem for mobile applications. Besides, to achieve a trade‐off between the cost and system delay, a fault‐tolerant dynamic resource scheduling method is proposed to address the scheduling problem in mobile edge cloud computing. The optimization problem could be formulated to minimize the application cost with the user‐defined deadline satisfied. Specifically, firstly, a game‐theoretic scheduling mechanism is adopted for resource provisioning and scheduling for multiprovider mobile applications. Then, a mobility‐aware dynamic scheduling strategy is presented to update the scheduling with the consideration of mobility of mobile users. Moreover, a failure recovery mechanism is proposed to deal with the uncertainties during the execution of mobile applications. Finally, experiments are designed and conducted to validate the effectiveness of our proposal. The experimental results show that our method could achieve a trade‐off between the cost and system delay.     

OPTIMIS: A holistic approach to cloud service provisioning

We present fundamental challenges for scalable and dependable service platforms and architectures that enable flexible and dynamic provisioning of cloud services. Our findings are incorporated in a toolkit targeting the cloud service and infrastructure providers. The innovations behind the toolkit are aimed at optimizing the whole service life cycle, including service construction, deployment, and operation, on a basis of aspects such as trust, risk, eco-efficiency and cost. Notably, adaptive self-preservation is crucial to meet predicted and unforeseen changes in resource requirements. By addressing the whole service life cycle, taking into account several cloud architectures, and by taking a holistic approach to sustainable service provisioning, the toolkit aims to provide a foundation for a reliable, sustainable, and trustful cloud computing industry.     

Towards an autonomic performance management approach for a cloud broker environment using a decomposition–coordination based methodology

Efficient resource allocation of computational resources to services is one of the predominant challenges in a cloud computing environment. Furthermore, the advent of cloud brokerage and federated cloud computing systems increases the complexity of cloud resource management. Cloud brokers are considered third party organizations that work as intermediaries between the service providers and the cloud providers. Cloud brokers rent different types of cloud resources from a number of cloud providers and sublet these resources to the requesting service providers. In this paper, an autonomic performance management approach is introduced that provides dynamic resource allocation capabilities for deploying a set of services over a federated cloud computing infrastructure by considering the availability as well as the demand of the cloud computing resources. A distributed control based approach is used for providing autonomic computing features to the proposed framework via a feedback-based control loop. This distributed control based approach is developed using one of the decomposition–coordination methodologies, named interaction balance, for interactive bidding of cloud computing resources. The primary goals of the proposed approach are to maintain the service level agreements, maximize the profit, and minimize the operating cost for the service providers and the cloud broker. The application of interaction balance methodology and prioritization of profit maximization for the cloud broker and the service providers during resource allocation are novel contributions of the proposed approach.     

Multi-Layer Resource Management in Cloud Computing

The paper studies multi-layer optimization in service oriented cloud computing to optimize the utility function of cloud computing, subject to resource constraints of an IaaS provider at the resource layer, service provisioning constraints of a SaaS provider at the service layer, and user QoS (quality of service) constraints of cloud users at application layer, respectively. The multi-layer optimization problem can be decomposed into three subproblems: cloud computing resource allocation problem, SaaS service provisioning problem, and user QoS maximization problem. The proposed algorithm decomposes the global optimization problem of cloud computing into three sub-problems via an iterative algorithm. The experiments are conducted to test the efficiency of the proposed algorithm with varying environmental parameters. The experiments also compare the performance of the proposed approach with other related work.     

DEPAS: a decentralized probabilistic algorithm for auto-scaling

The dynamic provisioning of virtualized resources offered by cloud computing infrastructures allows applications deployed in a cloud environment to automatically increase and decrease the amount of used resources. This capability is called auto-scaling and its main purpose is to automatically adjust the scale of the system that is running the application to satisfy the varying workload with minimum resource utilization. The need for auto-scaling is particularly important during workload peaks, in which applications may need to scale up to extremely large-scale systems. Both the research community and the main cloud providers have already developed auto-scaling solutions. However, most research solutions are centralized and not suitable for managing large-scale systems, moreover cloud providers’ solutions are bound to the limitations of a specific provider in terms of resource prices, availability, reliability, and connectivity. In this paper we propose DEPAS, a decentralized probabilistic auto-scaling algorithm integrated into a P2P architecture that is cloud provider independent, thus allowing the auto-scaling of services over multiple cloud infrastructures at the same time. Our experiments (simulations and real deployments), which are based on real service traces, show that our approach is capable of: (i) keeping the overall utilization of all the instantiated cloud resources in a target range, (ii) maintaining service response times close to the ones obtained using optimal centralized auto-scaling approaches.     

Cloud workflow scheduling with hybrid resource provisioning

Resource provisioning strategies are crucial for workflow scheduling problems which are widespread in cloud computing. The main challenge lies in determining the amounts of reserved and on-demand resources to meet users’ requirements. In this paper, we consider the cloud workflow scheduling problem with hybrid resource provisioning to minimize the total renting cost, which is NP-hard and has not been studied yet. An iterative population-based meta-heuristic is developed. According to the shift vectors obtained during the search procedure, timetables are computed quickly. The appropriate amounts of reserved and on-demand resources are determined by an incremental optimization method. The utilization of each resource is balanced in a swaying way, in terms of which the probabilistic matrix is updated for the next iteration. The proposed algorithm is compared with modified existing algorithms for similar problems. Experimental results demonstrate effectiveness and efficiency of the proposed algorithm.     

A game-theoretic method of fair resource allocation for cloud computing services

As cloud-based services become more numerous and dynamic, resource provisioning becomes more and more challenging. A QoS constrained resource allocation problem is considered in this paper, in which service demanders intend to solve sophisticated parallel computing problem by requesting the usage of resources across a cloud-based network, and a cost of each computational service depends on the amount of computation. Game theory is used to solve the problem of resource allocation. A practical approximated solution with the following two steps is proposed. First, each participant solves its optimal problem independently, without consideration of the multiplexing of resource assignments. A Binary Integer Programming method is proposed to solve the independent optimization. Second, an evolutionary mechanism is designed, which changes multiplexed strategies of the initial optimal solutions of different participants with minimizing their efficiency losses. The algorithms in the evolutionary mechanism take both optimization and fairness into account. It is demonstrated that Nash equilibrium always exists if the resource allocation game has feasible solutions.     

Dynamic cloud resource management for efficient media applications in mobile computing environments

Single-instruction-set architecture (Single-ISA) heterogeneous multi-core processors (HMP) are superior to Symmetric Multi-core processors in performance per watt. They are popular in many aspects of the Internet of Things, including mobile multimedia cloud computing platforms. One Single-ISA HMP integrates both fast out-of-order cores and slow simpler cores, while all cores are sharing the same ISA. The quality of service (QoS) is most important for virtual machine (VM) resource management in multimedia mobile computing, particularly in Single-ISA heterogeneous multi-core cloud computing platforms. Therefore, in this paper, we propose a dynamic cloud resource management (DCRM) policy to improve the QoS in multimedia mobile computing. DCRM dynamically and optimally partitions shared resources according to service or application requirements. Moreover, DCRM combines resource-aware VM allocation to maximize the effectiveness of the heterogeneous multi-core cloud platform. The basic idea for this performance improvement is to balance the shared resource allocations with these resources requirements. The experimental results show that DCRM behaves better in both response time and QoS, thus proving that DCRM is good at shared resource management in mobile media cloud computing.     

Scheduling multiple virtual environments in cloud federations for distributed calculations

In the pool of cloud providers that are currently available there is a lack of standardised APIs and brokering tools to effectively distribute high throughput calculations among them. Moreover, the current middleware tools are not able to straightforwardly provision the ephemeral and specific environments that certain codes and simulations require. These facts prevent the massive portability of legacy applications to cloud environments. Such an issue can be overcome by effectively scheduling the distributed calculations using the basic capacities offered by cloud federations. In this work, a framework achieving such a goal is presented: a pilot system (GWpilot) that has been improved with cloud computing capabilities (GWcloud). This framework profits from the expertise acquired in grid federations and provides interesting features that make it more efficient, flexible and useable than other approaches. Thus, decentralisation, middleware independence, dynamic brokering, on-demand provisioning of specific virtual images, compatibility with legacy applications, and the efficient accomplishment of short tasks, among other features, are achieved. Not only this, the new framework is multi-user and multi-application, dynamically instantiating virtual machines depending on the available and demanded resources, i.e. allowing users to consolidate their own resource provisioning. Results presented in this work demonstrate these features by efficiently executing several legacy applications with very different requirements on the FedCloud infrastructure at the same time.     

Cost-effective resource provisioning for multimedia cloud-based e-health systems

Recently, multimedia cloud is being considered as a new effective serving mode in e-Health area that meets the requirement of scalable and economic multimedia service for e-health. It can provide a flexible stack of powerful Virtual Machine (VM) resources of cloud like CPU, memory, storage, network bandwidth etc. on demand to manage e-health media services and applications (e.g. medical image/video retrieval, health video transcoding, streaming, video rendering, sharing and delivery) at lower cost. However, one major issue here is how to efficiently allocate VM resources dynamically based on e-health applications’ QoS demands and support energy and cost savings by optimizing the number of servers in use. In order to solve this problem, we propose a cost effective and dynamic VM allocation model based on Nash bargaining solution. With extensive simulations it is shown that the proposed mechanism can reduce the overall cost of running servers while at the same time guarantee QoS demand and maximize resource utilization in various dimensions of server resources.     

Elastic resource provisioning in hybrid mobile cloud for computationally intensive mobile applications

The paper addresses the integration of hybrid cloud with mobile applications. The challenge about hybrid mobile cloud resource provisioning is the trade-offs between energy consumption, performance provided to users and how resources, such as processing power and network, are being utilized. The proposed elastic hybrid mobile cloud resource provisioning model is jointly optimized to improve mobile user experience within the constraints of available resources and user QoS requirement. The paper presents the system utility of hybrid cloud system involving local cloud and public cloud infrastructure. From the perspectives of both mobile applications and cloud providers, the proposed system utility is optimized to improve the performance of mobile applications and the utilization of cloud resources. The proposed elastic hybrid mobile cloud resource provisioning algorithm includes two sub-algorithms. To evaluate and validate performance of the proposed algorithm, a series of experiments are conducted. The comparison results and analyses are discussed. The experimental results show the improvement to previous works.     

Semantic-enabled CARE Resource Broker (SeCRB) for managing grid and cloud environment

Grid computing is mainly helpful for executing high-performance computing applications. However, conventional grid resources sometimes fail to offer a dynamic application execution environment and this increases the rate at which the job requests of users are rejected. Integrating emerging virtualization technologies in grid and cloud computing facilitates the provision of dynamic virtual resources in the required execution environment. Resource brokers play a significant role in managing grid and cloud resources as well as identifying potential resources that satisfy users’ application requests. This research paper proposes a semantic-enabled CARE Resource Broker (SeCRB) that provides a common framework to describe grid and cloud resources, and to discover them in an intelligent manner by considering software, hardware and quality of service (QoS) requirements. The proposed semantic resource discovery mechanism classifies the resources into three categories viz., exact, high-similarity subsume and high-similarity plug-in regions. To achieve the necessary user QoS requirements, we have included a service level agreement (SLA) negotiation mechanism that pairs users’ QoS requirements with matching resources to guarantee the execution of applications, and to achieve the desired QoS of users. Finally, we have implemented the QoS-based resource scheduling mechanism that selects the resources from the SLA negotiation accepted list in an optimal manner. The proposed work is simulated and evaluated by submitting real-world bio-informatics and image processing application for various test cases. The result of the experiment shows that for jobs submitted to the resource broker, job rejection rate is reduced while job success and scheduling rates are increased, thus making the resource management system more efficient.