This paper introduces a cloud broker service (STRATOS) which facilitates the deployment and runtime management of cloud application topologies using cloud elements/services sourced on the fly from multiple providers, based on requirements specified in higher level objectives. Its implementation and use is evaluated in a set of experiments.

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Introducing STRATOS: A Cloud Broker Service

Mechanisms for SLA provisioning in cloud-based service providers

Quality attributes, such as performance or reliability, are crucial for the success of a software system and largely influenced by the software architecture Their quantitative prediction supports systematic, goal-oriented software design and forms a base of an engineering approach to software design This thesis proposes a method and tool to automatically improve component-based software architecture (CBA) models based on such quantitative quality prediction techniques Umfang: XXII, 555 S Preis: €5200 | £4800 | $9100

Automated Improvement of Software Architecture Models for Performance and Other Quality Attributes

In the today Internet of Services, one of the challenges of Application Service Providers (ASPs) is to fulfill the QoS requirements stated in the Service Level Agreements (SLAs) established with different consumers and to minimize the investment and management costs. Cloud computing is the promising solution for ASPs that increasingly demand for an elastic infrastructure. In this paper, we formulate the ASP resource management as an optimization problem and propose both reactive and proactive heuristic policies that approximate the optimal solution. The proposed policies leverage on information about the system performance history and can be applied at runtime because of their reduced computational time. Our experimental results show that some heuristics based on prediction approximate the exact knowledge of the workload.

SLA-aware Resource Management for Application Service Providers in the Cloud

Cloud computing is still a juvenile and most dynamic field characterized by a buzzing IT industry. Virtually every industry and even some parts of the public sector are taking on cloud computing today, either as a provider or as a consumer. It has now become essentially an inseparable part of everyone's life. The cloud thus has become a part of the critical global infrastructure but is unique in that it has no customary borders to safeguard it from attacks. Once weakened these web servers can serve as a launching point for conducting further attacks against users in the cloud. One such attack is the DoS or its version DDOS attack. Distributed Denial of Service (DdoS) Attacks have recently emerged as one of the most newsworthy, if not the greatest weaknesses of the Internet. DDoS attacks cause economic losses due to the unavailability of services and potentially serious security problems due to incapacitation of critical infrastructures. This paper presents a simple distance estimation based technique to detect and prevent the cloud from flooding based DDoS attack and thereby protect other servers and users from its adverse effects.

Securing Cloud Servers Against Flooding Based DDOS Attacks

In this paper, we discuss several facets of optimization in cloud computing, the corresponding challenges and propose an architecture for addressing those challenges. We consider a layered cloud where various cloud layers virtualize parts of the cloud infrastructure. The architecture takes into account different stakeholders in the cloud (infrastructure providers, platform providers, application providers and end users). The architecture supports self-management by automating most of the activities pertaining to optimization: monitoring, analysis and prediction, planning and execution.

A business driven cloud optimization architecture

With the advent of social networking and the appearance of Web 2.0, collaborative applications which allow users to share data online, often in real-time, have gained increasing prominence. Whether for sharing images, sharing videos, or even sharing live gaming sessions, such applications must deal with session sizes from tens to tens of thousands of people. However, existing products have not been able to provide a scalable cloud-based system that synchronizes disparate web content among many users. Such a goal is desired in order to provide the benefits of cloud deployments to collaborative applications. Many such applications cannot predict the number of connections which they may need to handle. As such, applications must either provision a higher number of servers in anticipation of more traffic, or be faced with a degradation of the user experience when a large number of clients connect to the application. Cloud-based deployments can alleviate these issues by allowing the application's server base to scale automatically with user demand. A cloud deployment can also distribute servers throughout different geographic locations in order to offer improved latency and response times to its clients. This paper will present an architecture for a distributed, collaborative, and server-based application. The application is deployed inside a distributed cloud environment, which consists of multiple clouds in various geographic locations.

Joanna Ng

Papers

A business driven cloud optimization architecture

Distributed clouds for collaborative applications