面向多租户的门户资源管理框架

为了提高企业信息门户中间件平台的资源利用率,提出了一个面向多租户架构的资源管理框架。针对门户应用场景中资源的特点,在建立资源模型的基础上,通过元数据描述租户与资源的映射关系,并针对不同类型的资源,提供相应的资源共享和隔离机制。在提高资源利用率的同时,向资源使用者屏蔽对租户敏感资源的访问细节,简化多租户环境中逻辑资源的管理问题。将该框架应用于OncePortal门户中间件,并在此基础上进行了实验分析,结果表明了框架的可行性和有效性。     

基于原生数据库的SaaS存储模型

SaaS应用中的多租户数据存储是当前的热门研究点, 现有解决方案大都基于关系数据库, 采用模式映射技术. 从SaaS的存储灵活性和分布式特点分析了使用原生XML数据库的可行性, 并给出了适合多租户数据的XML存储结构, 能够有效支持SaaS的上述特点.     

Risk assessment in service provider communities

Online service delivery undertaken between clients and service providers often incurs risks for both the client and the provider, especially when such an exchange takes place in the context of an electronic service market. For the client, the risk involves determining whether the requested service will be delivered on time and based on the previously agreed Service Level Agreement (SLA). Often risk to the client can be mitigated through the use of a penalty clause in an SLA. For the provider, the risk revolves around ensuring that the client will pay the advertised price and more importantly whether the provider will be able to deliver the advertised service to not incur the penalty identified in the SLA. This becomes more significant when the service providers outsource the actual enactment/execution to a data centre — a trend that has become dominant in recent years, with the emergence of infrastructure providers such as Amazon. In this work we investigate the notion of “risk” from a variety of different perspectives and demonstrate how risk to a service owner (who uses an external, third party data centre for service hosting) can be managed more effectively. A simulation based approach is used to validate our findings.     

Metrics and techniques for quantifying performance isolation in cloud environments

The cloud computing paradigm enables the provision of cost efficient IT-services by leveraging economies of scale and sharing data center resources efficiently among multiple independent applications and customers. However, the sharing of resources leads to possible interference between users and performance problems are one of the major obstacles for potential cloud customers. Consequently, it is one of the primary goals of cloud service providers to have different customers and their hosted applications isolated as much as possible in terms of the performance they observe. To make different offerings, comparable with regards to their performance isolation capabilities, a representative metric is needed to quantify the level of performance isolation in cloud environments. Such a metric should allow to measure externally by running benchmarks from the outside treating the cloud as a black box. In this article, we propose three different types of novel metrics for quantifying the performance isolation of cloud-based systems.We consider four new approaches to achieve performance isolation in Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) offerings and evaluate them based on the proposed metrics as part of a simulation-based case study. To demonstrate the effectiveness and practical applicability of the proposed metrics for quantifying the performance isolation in various scenarios, we present a second case study evaluating performance isolation of the hypervisor Xen.     

Efficient customization of multi-tenant Software-as-a-Service applications with service lines

Application-level multi-tenancy is an architectural approach for Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) applications which enables high operational cost efficiency by sharing one application instance among multiple customer organizations (the so-called tenants). However, the focus on increased resource sharing typically results in a one-size-fits-all approach. In principle, the shared application instance satisfies only the requirements common to all tenants, without supporting potentially different and varying requirements of these tenants. As a consequence, multi-tenant SaaS applications are inherently limited in terms of flexibility and variability.This paper presents an integrated service engineering method, called service line engineering, that supports co-existing tenant-specific configurations and that facilitates the development and management of customizable, multi-tenant SaaS applications, without compromising scalability. Specifically, the method spans the design, implementation, configuration, composition, operations and maintenance of a SaaS application that bundles all variations that are based on a common core.We validate this work by illustrating the benefits of our method in the development of a real-world SaaS offering for document processing. We explicitly show that the effort to configure and compose an application variant for each individual tenant is significantly reduced, though at the expense of a higher initial development effort.