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Showing papers on "Service level objective published in 2014"


Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: By dividing the research into four main groups based on the problem-solving approaches and identifying the investigated quality of service parameters, intended objectives, and developing environments, beneficial results and statistics are obtained that can contribute to future research.
Abstract: The increasing tendency of network service users to use cloud computing encourages web service vendors to supply services that have different functional and nonfunctional (quality of service) features and provide them in a service pool. Based on supply and demand rules and because of the exuberant growth of the services that are offered, cloud service brokers face tough competition against each other in providing quality of service enhancements. Such competition leads to a difficult and complicated process to provide simple service selection and composition in supplying composite services in the cloud, which should be considered an NP-hard problem. How to select appropriate services from the service pool, overcome composition restrictions, determine the importance of different quality of service parameters, focus on the dynamic characteristics of the problem, and address rapid changes in the properties of the services and network appear to be among the most important issues that must be investigated and addressed. In this paper, utilizing a systematic literature review, important questions that can be raised about the research performed in addressing the above-mentioned problem have been extracted and put forth. Then, by dividing the research into four main groups based on the problem-solving approaches and identifying the investigated quality of service parameters, intended objectives, and developing environments, beneficial results and statistics are obtained that can contribute to future research.

367 citations


Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: In this article, the authors propose a conceptual model based on mental accounting principles derived from prospect theory and develop a series of research propositions to explicate the links between distribution patterns of service failures/delights and service quality perceptions.
Abstract: Service delivery often involves a series of events or stages of exchange between a service provider and its customer. At each stage, performance can meet, exceed, or fall below the customer's expectations. This article contributes to the literature by examining how the patterns of distribution (frequency, timing, proximity, and sequence) of service failures and delights affect customers' perceptions of service quality. The authors propose a conceptual model based on mental accounting principles derived from prospect theory and develop a series of research propositions to explicate the links between distribution patterns of service failures/delights and service quality perceptions. The study integrates prospect theory with service encounter research and provides a comprehensive theory-driven platform for exploring the impact of various service failure and delight distribution patterns. In addition, it offers important managerial implications for service design and resource allocation regarding when, how of...

151 citations


Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: This paper proposes a novel self‐adaptive approach that selects suitable forecasting methods for a given context based on a decision tree and direct feedback cycles together with a corresponding implementation and shows that the implementation of this approach provides continuous and reliable forecast results at run‐time.
Abstract: As modern enterprise software systems become increasingly dynamic, workload forecasting techniques are gaining an importance as a foundation for online capacity planning and resource management. Time series analysis offers a broad spectrum of methods to calculate workload forecasts based on history monitoring data. Related work in the field of workload forecasting mostly concentrates on evaluating specific methods and their individual optimisation potential or on predicting QoS metrics directly. As a basis, we present a survey on established forecasting methods of the time series analysis concerning their benefits and drawbacks and group them according to their computational overheads. In this paper, we propose a novel self-adaptive approach that selects suitable forecasting methods for a given context based on a decision tree and direct feedback cycles together with a corresponding implementation. The user needs to provide only his general forecasting objectives. In several experiments and case studies based on real-world workload traces, we show that our implementation of the approach provides continuous and reliable forecast results at run-time. The results of this extensive evaluation show that the relative error of the individual forecast points is significantly reduced compared with statically applied forecasting methods, for example, in an exemplary scenario on average by 37%. In a case study, between 55 and 75% of the violations of a given service level objective can be prevented by applying proactive resource provisioning based on the forecast results of our implementation. Copyright © 2014 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

122 citations


Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: In this article, the authors identify key influencing factors for providers' willingness to bear performance-based contracting (PBC)induced risk in the food retail and automotive industries, through interviews with 30 managers of providers and sub-contractors.
Abstract: Purpose – The performance of service supply chains in terms of service levels and cost efficiency depends not only on the effort of service providers but also on the inputs of sub-contractors and the customer. In this sense, performance-based contracting (PBC) entails increased financial risk for providers. Allocating and managing risk through contractual relationships along the service supply chain is a critical issue, and yet there is scant empirical evidence regarding what factors influence, and how, provider willingness to bear PBC-induced risk. This paper aims to address this gap. Design/methodology/approach – The paper draws on agency theory and two cases of logistics service supply chains, in the food retail and automotive industries respectively, to identify key influencing factors. Data were collected through semi-structured interviews with 30 managers of providers and sub-contractors and review of 35 documents, notably contracts and target letters. Findings – Four influencing factors were found:...

110 citations


Patent
11 Feb 2014
TL;DR: In this paper, a method is provided for delivering customized network services to subscribers of a managed security service provider, where a request is received, at a service management system (SMS) of the service provider to establish an Internet Protocol (IP) connection between a first and second location of a first subscriber of the MSP.
Abstract: Methods and systems for a flexible, scalable hardware and software platform that allows a managed security service provider to easily provide security services to multiple customers are provided. According to one embodiment, a method is provided for delivering customized network services to subscribers of the service provider. A request is received, at a service management system (SMS) of the service provider, to establish an Internet Protocol (IP) connection between a first and second location of a first subscriber of the managed security service provider. Responsive to the request, the SMS causes a tunnel to be established between a first and second service processing switch of the service provider which are coupled in communication via a public network and associated with the first location and the second location, respectively.

108 citations


Proceedings ArticleDOI
03 Nov 2014
TL;DR: This paper evaluated the approach using 45 months of workload data from 6 production clusters at Google, and showed that 6--17% of the resources can be re-offered with a long-term availability of 98.9% or better, and may increase the profitability of selling reclaimed resources by 22--60%.
Abstract: The elasticity promised by cloud computing does not come for free. Providers need to reserve resources to allow users to scale on demand, and cope with workload variations, which results in low utilization. The current response to this low utilization is to re-sell unused resources with no Service Level Objectives (SLOs) for availability. In this paper, we show how to make some of these reclaimable resources more valuable by providing strong, long-term availability SLOs for them. These SLOs are based on forecasts of how many resources will remain unused during multi-month periods, so users can do capacity planning for their long-running services. By using confidence levels for the predictions, we give service providers control over the risk of violating the availability SLOs, and allow them trade increased risk for more resources to make available. We evaluated our approach using 45 months of workload data from 6 production clusters at Google, and show that 6--17% of the resources can be re-offered with a long-term availability of 98.9% or better. A conservative analysis shows that doing so may increase the profitability of selling reclaimed resources by 22--60%.

98 citations


Patent
23 Sep 2014
TL;DR: In this article, the authors proposed a trust score computation that weights the trustworthiness of the device context requesting communication with a service provider, based on a combination of identification factors selected by the user can be aggregated together to produce a trustworthiness high enough to gain access to a given online service provider.
Abstract: Device identification scoring systems and methods may be provided that can increase the reliability and security of communications between devices and service providers. Users may select and configure additional identification factors that are unique and convenient for them. These factors, along with additional environmental variables, feed into a trust score computation that weights the trustworthiness of the device context requesting communication with a service provider. Service providers rely on the trust score rather than enforce a specific identification routine themselves. A combination of identification factors selected by the user can be aggregated together to produce a trust score high enough to gain access to a given online service provider. A threshold of identification risk may be required to access a service or account provided by the online service provider.

94 citations


Proceedings ArticleDOI
03 Nov 2014
TL;DR: This paper describes PriorityMeister -- a system that employs a combination of per-workload priorities and rate limits to provide tail latency QoS for shared networked storage, even with bursty workloads.
Abstract: Meeting service level objectives (SLOs) for tail latency is an important and challenging open problem in cloud computing infrastructures. The challenges are exacerbated by burstiness in the workloads. This paper describes PriorityMeister -- a system that employs a combination of per-workload priorities and rate limits to provide tail latency QoS for shared networked storage, even with bursty workloads. PriorityMeister automatically and proactively configures workload priorities and rate limits across multiple stages (e.g., a shared storage stage followed by a shared network stage) to meet end-to-end tail latency SLOs. In real system experiments and under production trace workloads, PriorityMeister outperforms most recent reactive request scheduling approaches, with more workloads satisfying latency SLOs at higher latency percentiles. PriorityMeister is also robust to mis-estimation of underlying storage device performance and contains the effect of misbehaving workloads.

94 citations


Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: A cloud service selection methodology that utilizes quality of service history of cloud services over different time periods and performs parallel multi-criteria decision analysis to rank all cloud services in each time period in accordance with user preferences before aggregating the results to determine the overall rank of all the available options.
Abstract: The growing number of cloud services has made service selection a challenging decision-making problem by offering wide ranging choices for cloud service consumers. This necessitates the use of formal decision making methodologies to assist a decision maker in selecting the service that best fulfills the user's requirements. In this paper, we present a cloud service selection methodology that utilizes quality of service history of cloud services over different time periods and performs parallel multi-criteria decision analysis to rank all cloud services in each time period in accordance with user preferences before aggregating the results to determine the overall rank of all the available options for cloud service selection. This methodology assists the cloud service user to select the best possible available service according to the requirements. The multi-criteria decision making processes used for each time period are independent of the other time periods and are executed in parallel.

89 citations


Journal ArticleDOI
07 Feb 2014
TL;DR: The results confirm that this approach has ability to improve users' satisfaction level that cause to gain in profitability and new methods based on learning automaton for estimation of these characteristics are provided.
Abstract: User satisfaction as a significant antecedent to user loyalty has been highlighted by many researchers in market based literatures SLA violation as an important factor can decrease users’ satisfaction level The amount of this decrease depends on user's characteristics Some of these characteristics are related to QoS requirements and announced to service provider through SLAs But some of them are unknown for service provider and selfish users are not interested to reveal them truly Most the works in literature ignore considering such characteristics and treat users just based on SLA parameters So, two users with different characteristics but similar SLAs have equal importance for the service provider In this paper, we use two user's hidden characteristics, named willingness to pay for service and willingness to pay for certainty, to present a new proactive resource allocation approach with aim of decreasing impact of SLA violations New methods based on learning automaton for estimation of these characteristics are provided as well To validate our approach we conducted some numerical simulations in critical situations The results confirm that our approach has ability to improve users’ satisfaction level that cause to gain in profitability

88 citations


Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: In this article, the authors explore non-monetary and monetary outcomes of customer-based corporate reputation and hypothesize that commitment serves as a partial mediator, while service context risk is a moderator, of these relationships.
Abstract: A firm's reputation is an important intangible asset, because of its potential for value creation. The authors explore non-monetary and monetary outcomes of customer-based corporate reputation (CBR) and hypothesize that commitment serves as a partial mediator, while service context risk is a moderator, of these relationships. Using a large sample of service customers who evaluated the reputation of service firms in four service categories, the results show that (1) commitment partially mediates the relationship between CBR and most of the outcome variables, and (2) service provider selection risk moderates these relationships, such that reputation has a stronger effect on several non-monetary outcomes for higher-risk services and commitment has a stronger effect for lower-risk services, consistent with a dual-processing framework explanation. The authors discuss the theoretical and managerial implications.

Journal ArticleDOI
Sam Aflaki1, Ioana Popescu2
TL;DR: In this article, the authors propose a dynamic model that relies on behavioral theories and empirical evidence to capture the effect of past service experiences on service quality expectations, customer satisfaction, and retention.
Abstract: In a repeat business context, past experiences with a service provider affect customers' decisions to renew their contract. How should a strategic firm manage customized service over time to maximize the long-term value from each customer relationship? We propose a dynamic model that relies on behavioral theories and empirical evidence to capture the effect of past service experiences on service quality expectations, customer satisfaction, and retention. Although firms can benefit from managing service expectations at the beginning of a relationship, we find that varying service in the long run is not optimal. Behavioral regularities explain the structure of optimal service policies and limit the value of responsive service. Loss aversion expands the range of optimal constant policies; however, if satisfying experiences are more salient, then firms should constantly vary service levels. Loyal or high-margin customers need not warrant better service; those who anchor less on past service experiences do---provided that retention is improved by better past experiences. The effect of customer memory on service levels is determined by whether habituation or rather goodwill drives defection decisions. This paper was accepted by Christian Terwiesch, operations management.

Journal ArticleDOI
01 Jan 2014
TL;DR: Two novel concepts, called service intension and service extension, are presented, which allow one to divide the basic elements of a web service definition into two parts and are used to propose a constraint-aware service composition method in which service constraints are well taken care.
Abstract: The creation of value-added services by automatic composition of existing ones is gaining significant momentum as the potential silver bullet in service-oriented computing. A large number of composition methods have been proposed, and most of them are based on the matching of input and output parameters of services only. However, most services in the real world are not universally applicable, and some applicable conditions or restrictions are imposed on them by their providers. Such constraints have a great impact on service composition, but have been largely ignored by the existing methods. In this paper, they are discussed and defined, and a simple formal expression is adopted to describe them. Two novel concepts, called service intension and service extension, are presented, which allow one to divide the basic elements of a web service definition into two parts. Consequently, their use allows us to propose a constraint-aware service composition method in which service constraints are well taken care. The proposed solution includes a graph search-based algorithm and two novel preprocessing methods. A publicly available test set from ICEBE05 is used to evaluate and analyze the proposed methodology.

Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: A game-theoretic model is developed to investigate pricing strategies and the market outcome in service markets where the provider has two-dimensional private information about her own type whether ethical or self-interested and about the customer's condition whether serious or minor.
Abstract: In many service markets such as consulting, auto repair, financial planning, and healthcare, the service provider may have more information about the customer's problem than the customer, and different customers may impose different costs on the service provider. In principle, the service provider should ethically care about the customer's welfare, but it is possible that a provider may maximize only its own profit. Moreover, the customer may not know ex ante whether the provider is ethical or purely self-interested. We develop a game-theoretic model to investigate pricing strategies and the market outcome in service markets where the provider has two-dimensional private information about her own type whether ethical or self-interested and about the customer's condition whether serious or minor. We show that in a less ethical market, a self-interested provider will charge different prices based on the customer's condition, whereas an ethical provider will charge the same price for both conditions. In contrast, in a more ethical market, both the self-interested and the ethical provider will charge the same uniform price to both types of customers. Interestingly, both market efficiency and the customer's ex ante expected surplus might be lower in a more ethical market than in a less ethical one.

Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: An analytical model of joint production between a service provider and a customer is developed and it is shown that, as a task becomes more standard, it is desirable to decrease the degree of interaction between the provider and the customer by making their efforts more substitutable and to allocate most of the work to whoever is the most efficient.
Abstract: In services, customers provide significant inputs into the production process. In particular, these inputs may be the customers themselves participating in the service delivery. Although many service firms have explored different ways of involving customers in their production process, there is no clear guideline for the design of such coproductive systems. In this paper, we develop an analytical model of joint production between a service provider and a customer and characterize how a service firm should design its coproductive system. We show that, as a task becomes more standard, it is desirable to decrease the degree of interaction between the provider and the customer by making their efforts more substitutable and to allocate most of the work to whoever is the most efficient. Conversely, as a task becomes less standard, it is optimal to increase interaction by making efforts more complementary and to balance the work allocation. Our analysis gives rise to a service-process framework with three archet...

Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: In this article, the authors propose a SErvice Engineering Methodology (SEEM) which aims to support servitizing companies in: (i) reengineering of service and product-services offering, (ii) defining the most suitable and complete service and/or solution for customers, and (iii) balancing the excellence in the customer satisfaction and the efficiency and productivity in the service provision process.

Proceedings ArticleDOI
08 Sep 2014
TL;DR: This paper presents a model-based approach to ensure that the application performance meets the user-defined SLO efficiently by runtime "vertical scaling" of individual virtual machines (VMs) running the application.
Abstract: Applications in virtualized data centers are often subject to Service Level Objectives (SLOs) regarding their performance (e.g., latency or throughput). In order to fulfill these SLOs, it is necessary to allocate sufficient resources of different types (CPU, memory, I/O, etc.) to an application. However, the relationship between the application performance and the resource allocation is complex and depends on multiple factors including application architecture, system configuration, and workload demands. In this paper, we present a model-based approach to ensure that the application performance meets the user-defined SLO efficiently by runtime "vertical scaling" (i.e., adding or removing resources) of individual virtual machines (VMs) running the application. A layered performance model describing the relationship between the resource allocation and the observed application performance is automatically extracted and updated online using resource demand estimation techniques. Such a model is then used in a feedback controller to dynamically adapt the number of virtual CPUs of individual VMs. We have implemented the controller on top of the VMware vSphere platform and evaluated it in a case study using a real-world email and groupware server. The experimental results show that our approach allows the managed application to achieve SLO satisfaction in spite of workload demand variation while avoiding oscillations commonly observed with state-of-the-art threshold-based controllers.

Proceedings ArticleDOI
27 Mar 2014
TL;DR: This paper identifies QoS metrics and defines it in such a way that user and provider both can express their expectation and offers respectively into quantified form.
Abstract: Cloud computing provides computing resources on demand. It is a promising solution for utility computing. Increasing number of cloud service providers having similar functionality poses a problem to cloud users of its selection. To assist the users, for selection of a best service provider as per user's requirement, it is necessary to create a solution. User may provide its QoS expectation and service providers may also express the offers. Experience of existing users may also be beneficial in selection of best cloud service provider. This paper identifies QoS metrics and defines it in such a way that user and provider both can express their expectation and offers respectively into quantified form. A dynamic and flexible framework using Ranked Voting Method is proposed which takes requirement of user as an input and provides a best provider as output.

Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: With this new definition of the service system, a service system can be distinguished from other systems, such as manufacturing system, agricultural system, and product system and will be useful to classification of various service systems and various theories for service systems.
Abstract: In this paper, a unified definition of the service system is proposed. The motivation of this research effort is based on our observation that there are diverse definitions or descriptions of the service system in the literature and they have not provided an identity of the service system. Our goal to define the service system is thus to establish its identity. The most salient feature in our definition is the introduction of three subsystems in a service system: infrastructure, substance, and management. The substance flows over the infrastructure under the constraints of management. A service is established at the moment when the substance interacts with the human to cause a change in the human's status or state under a protocol, which further meets the human's request and need. With this new definition, a service system can be distinguished from other systems, such as manufacturing system, agricultural system, and product system. The new definition will be useful to classification of various service systems and various theories for service systems, which is the key to knowledge management for service systems and to optimization of design and management of service systems.

Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: This paper formally proposes a business correlation model including both quality correlations and selection correlations, and presents an efficient approach for correlation-driven QoS-aware optimal service selection based on a genetic algorithm.
Abstract: A virtual enterprise is an emerging business cooperation model which allows rapid response to the unpredictable market behavior and opportunity. For service oriented enterprises, where computing resources are encapsulated as services and published online, establishing a virtual enterprise can be regarded as a process of service composition. As there are increasing numbers of available services providing similar functionalities but with different quality values, and with potential business correlations among them, it is not trivial to orchestrate a composite service with optimal overall quality of service (QoS). In this paper, we formally propose a business correlation model including both quality correlations and selection correlations, and then present an efficient approach for correlation-driven QoS-aware optimal service selection based on a genetic algorithm. The genetic algorithm is tailored with niching technology, a repair operator and a penalty mechanism. The effectiveness and efficiency of the approach are demonstrated via empirical studies at last.

Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: In this article, a novel and unique methodology for evaluating the effectiveness performance of a port's individual services by utilizing the concept of the port service chain is presented, a service network utilized by a port service provider in the provision of the services that accounts for the quality-of-service relationships among the services.
Abstract: This paper provides a novel and unique methodology for evaluating the effectiveness performance of a port’s individual services by utilizing the concept of a port service chain – a service network utilized by a port’s service providers in the provision of the port’s services that accounts for the quality-of-service relationships among the services. If such relationships are ignored, the resource allocations by the port’s service providers to improve the quality of their port services will either over- or underestimate the amount of resources needed. A cooperative port service chain will always (under certain conditions) be more effective than a non-cooperative port service chain.

Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: The goal of this paper is to identify the public transport system's service quality elements that should be primarily acted on, in order to increase the level of service quality from transport system users’ and non-users’ point of view, with minimal investment.
Abstract: This paper presents the research and analysis process showing that transport system customers have a specific perception of service quality, as an indicator of transport system. Determining satisfactory level of service quality implies knowledge of travel demand and travel behaviour. There are a lot of elements that define the transport system quality. The goal of this paper is to identify the public transport system's service quality elements that should be primarily acted on, in order to increase the level of service quality from transport system users’ (public transport users’ and non-users’) point of view, with minimal investment. The paper describes a specifically defined research methodology for determining service quality elements that should be primarily acted on, from the transport system users’ point of view. Methodology involves the use of Importance Performance Analysis (IPA) which is upgraded with the state preferences analysis. Presented methodology, which is used to determine user p...

Journal ArticleDOI
15 Mar 2014
TL;DR: In this article, a hybrid model based on the previous works has been proposed to investigate service quality indexes in Internet Banking and six service quality dimensions namely reliability, efficiency, responsiveness, fulfillment, security/privacy, and website design have been established based on literature review.
Abstract: This paper presents a study to investigate service quality indexes in Internet Banking. This is an applied research study of descriptive-surveying kind .The purpose of this research is to understand the impact of service quality factors of Internet Banking on customer satisfaction in Iran .To study the relation between service quality and customer satisfaction, first a hybrid model based on the previous works has been proposed. Six service quality dimensions namely reliability, efficiency, responsiveness, fulfillment, security / privacy and website design have been established based on the literature review. The data were gathered through survey interview by a questionnaire that was designed on a 5-Point Likert scale .This study evaluated influence of service quality on customer satisfaction in Internet Banking .The study shows that the Six service quality dimensions has meaningful relationship with customer satisfaction in Internet Banking and reliability has most relation and website design has least relation to customer satisfaction.

Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: This paper devises 36 service models that combine various options of carsharing service by considering relocation techniques and trip types and develops a simulation tool based on fuzzy classification, which can evaluate the performance of service models in a Carsharing system.

Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: In this paper, a qualitative analysis of narratives of service recovery experiences and a quantitative assessment of scenario-based survey data was conducted to investigate the impact of co-created service recovery failures in the absence of one resource or mismatches in their integration.
Abstract: Customers and employees can co-create a resolution following a service failure through integrating their resources. Their activities and interactions during resource-integration shape the customers' service recovery experiences. Prior research overlooks resource integration between all involved actors in a co-created service recovery process. This research details the process with two empirical studies. Study 1 is a qualitative analysis of narratives of service recovery experiences; Study 2 is a quantitative assessment of scenario-based survey data. The results show that a favourable service recovery experience is resulted from integrating all involved actors' resources in a mutually beneficial manner. Three key resources are financial compensation, service skills including communication and timing. Our findings indicate that co-created service recovery fails in the absence of just one resource or mismatches in their integration. The combined studies reveal that customers use their justice perceptions to ...

Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: In this article, an international survey was performed, showing that very little attention is paid to service reliability during the design of the network and of the timetable, and that there is little consistency in approaches.

Proceedings ArticleDOI
01 Oct 2014
TL;DR: This study proposes and compares cost-aware and SLA-based algorithms which provision cloud resources and schedule analytics tasks and model infrastructures as a list of data centers, virtual machines, data sources, and network throughputs.
Abstract: The stunning growth in data has immensely impacted organizations. Their infrastructure and traditional data management system could not keep up to scale of Big Data. They have to either invest heavily on their infrastructure or move their Big Data analytics to Cloud where they can benefit from both on-demand scalability and contemporary data management techniques. However, to make Cloud hosted Big Data analytics available to wider range of enterprises, we have to carefully capture their preferences in terms of budget and service level objectives. Therefore, this study aims at proposing a SLA and cost-aware resource provisioning and task scheduling approach tailored for Big Data applications in the Cloud. Current approaches assume that data is pre-stored in cluster nodes prior to deployment of Big Data applications. In addition, their focus is purely on task scheduling, and not virtual machine provisioning. We argue that in the Cloud computing context this is not applicable, because the nodes are provisioned dynamically (data cannot be pre-stored) and leaving provisioning to user may lead to under or over provisioning that can both lead to SLA or budget constraint violations. Therefore,in this study we first model the user request, which consist of Big Data analytics jobs with budget and deadline. Then, we model infrastructures as a list of data centers, virtual machines (offered in a pay-as-you-go model), data sources, and network throughputs. After that, to address the aforementioned issues, we propose and compare cost-aware and SLA-based algorithms which provision cloud resources and schedule analytics tasks.

Proceedings ArticleDOI
05 May 2014
TL;DR: AppRM is presented, a tool that automatically sets resource controls for both virtual machines and resource pools to meet application SLOs and is able to deliver application performance satisfaction without manual intervention.
Abstract: Most modern hypervisors offer powerful resource control primitives such as reservations, limits, and shares for individual virtual machines (VMs). These primitives provide a means to dynamic vertical scaling of VMs in order for the virtual applications to meet their respective service level objectives (SLOs). VMware DRS offers an additional resource abstraction of a resource pool (RP) as a logical container representing an aggregate resource allocation for a collection of VMs. In spite of the abundant research on translating application performance goals to resource requirements, the implementation of VM vertical scaling techniques in commercial products remains limited. In addition, no prior research has studied automatic adjustment of resource control settings at the resource pool level. In this paper, we present AppRM, a tool that automatically sets resource controls for both virtual machines and resource pools to meet application SLOs. AppRM contains a hierarchy of virtual application managers and resource pool managers. At the application level, AppRM translates performance objectives into the appropriate resource control settings for the individual VMs running that application. At the resource pool level, AppRM ensures that all important applications within the resource pool can meet their performance targets by adjusting controls at the resource pool level. Experimental results under a variety of dynamically changing workloads composed by multi-tiered applications demonstrate the effectiveness of AppRM. In all cases, AppRM is able to deliver application performance satisfaction without manual intervention.

Patent
13 Jun 2014
TL;DR: In this article, a method for geo-location services is described, which includes monitoring, via a sensor, a location of a service provider in relation to a predetermined location and receiving a request for a current status of the service provider.
Abstract: A method for geo-location services is described. In one embodiment, the method includes monitoring, via a sensor, a location of a service provider in relation to a predetermined location and receiving a request for a current status of the service provider. The current status includes a current location of the service provider and a current job-related status of the service provider. Upon determining the current status of the service provider, a notification including the current status of the service provider is generated.

Patent
11 Nov 2014
TL;DR: In this article, a service provider system may implement an enterprise catalog service that manages software products and portfolios of software products on behalf of service provider customer organizations, and each constraint may include one or more rules about how the products can be launched.
Abstract: A service provider system may implement an enterprise catalog service that manages software products and portfolios of software products on behalf of service provider customer organizations. Through an administrator interface of the service, a customer organization administrator may create constraints on the use of the software products, and each constraint may include one or more rules about how the products can be launched. These may include environmental constraints (specifying a region in which a product launches), restrictions on input parameter values (including the types of resource instances on which a product can be launched), quotas (controlling the number of product installations), or billing constraints. Constraints may be applied on a user-to-product arc or on a portfolio-to-product arc. Constraints may be stored as objects, and reference to those objects may be added to product or portfolio objects. Constraints may be shared across object versions, portfolios, or service provider customer accounts.