Automatic Dynamic Allocation of Cloud Storage for Scientific Applications

With the tremendous growth in migration to cloud computing for traditional applications, the demand for virtualization is the new need for further research and enhancements. The high demand for virtualization in cloud computing is been addressed with the technology enhancement and in terms of virtual machines. Majorly the hardware component management of virtual machine is considerably reaching the pick of research with the recent advancements by multiple companies and open source researches like AlphaVM, Hyper-V, Integrity Virtual Machines, JPC (Virtual Machine), PowerVM, Sun xVM, VMware Workstation and z LPARs. Another most important component of virtualization and virtual machine image storage is been the bottleneck for the further advancement. The limitations are been addressed by clustering and storage area networking, however these existing solutions are no match for the industrial grade demand for the VM image storage requirements.Hence in this work we propose a cloud based virtual machine storage framework designed for large scale deployment satisfying the other needs for storage features like replication and measurements of performance improvements. This work also demonstrates the advancements in performance for virtualization management

With the rapid development of virtualization technology, virtual machine (VM) is widely used by cloud computing - the more and more popular computing paradigm. Thus, in order to guarantee the security of cloud computing, it is necessary to securely identify the kernel of VM, the software stack running on VM and the hardware platform which VM relies on. This paper designs a system of trusted connection based on virtual machine architecture and implements a system prototype. Our system not only can securely measure and identify the kernel of VM, the software stack running on VM and the hardware platform which VM relies on, but also can realize isolations to untrusted VMs. There are three main parts in our system: trusted chain, attestation and isolation. The experiments described in this paper prove that our system ensures trusted connection of VMs and achieves isolations to untrusted VMs. The performance of our system is also analyzed and evaluated. According to the analysis results, our system is practical in terms of performance.

In general, operating systems (OSs) are designed to mediate access to device hardware by applications. They process different kinds of system calls using an indiscriminate kernel with the same configuration. Applications in cloud computing platforms are constructed from service components. Each of the service components is assigned separately to an individual virtual machine (VM), which leads to homogeneous system calls on each VM. In addition, the requirements for kernel function and configuration of system parameters from different VMs are different. Therefore, the suit-to-all design incurs an unnecessary performance overhead and restricts the OS’s processing capacity in cloud computing. In this paper, we propose an adaptive model for cloud computing to resolve the conflict between generality and performance. Our model adaptively specializes the OS of a VM according to the resource-consuming characteristics of workloads on the VM. We implement a prototype of the adaptive model, vSpec. There are five classes of VM: CPU-intensive, memory-intensive, I/O-intensive, networkintensive and compound, according to the resource-consuming characteristics of the workloads running on the VMs. vSpec specializes the OS of a VM according to the VM class. We perform comprehensive experiments to evaluate the effectiveness of vSpec on benchmarks and real-world applications.

Cloud computing offers cost effective services on-demand which encourage critical infrastructure providers to consider migrating to the cloud. Critical infrastructures are considered as a backbone of modern societies such as power plants and water. Information in cloud computing is likely to be shared among different entities, which could have various degrees of sensitivity. This requires robust isolation and access control mechanisms. Although various access control models and policies have been developed, they cannot fulfil requirements for a cloud based access control system. The reason is that cloud computing has a diverse sets of security requirements and unique security challenges such as multi-tenant and heterogeneity of security policies, rules and domains. This thesis provides a detailed study of cloud computing security challenges and threats, which were used to identify security requirements for various critical infrastructure providers. We found that an access control system is a crucial security requirement for the surveyed critical infrastructure providers. Furthermore, the requirement analysis was used to propose a new criteria to evaluate access control systems for cloud computing. Moreover, this work presents a new cloud based access control model to meet the identified cloud access control requirements. The model does not only ensure the secure sharing of resources among potential untrusted tenants, but also has the capacity to support different access permissions for the same cloud user. Our focused in the proposed model is the lack of data isolation in lower levels (CPU caches), which could lead to bypass access control models to gain some sensitive information by using cache side-channel attacks. Therefore, the thesis investigates various real attack scenarios and the gaps in existing mitigation approaches. It presents a new Prime and Probe cache side-channel attack, which can give detailed information about addresses accessed by a virtual machine with no need for any information about cache sets accessed by the virtual machine. The design, implementation and evaluation of a proposed solution preventing cache side-channel attacks are also presented in the thesis. It is a new lightweight solution, which introduces very low overhead (less than 15,000 CPU cycles). It can be applied in any operating system and prevents cache side-channel attacks in cloud computing. The thesis also presents a new detecting cache side-channel attacks solution. It focuses on the infrastructure used to host cloud computing tenants by counting cache misses caused by a virtual machine. The detection solutions has 0% false negative and 15% false positive.

Cloud computing models use virtual machine (VM) clusters for protecting resources from failure with backup capability. Cloud user tasks are scheduled by selecting suitable resources for executing the task in the VM cluster. Existing VM clustering processes suffer from issues like preconfiguration, downtime, complex backup process, and disaster management. VM infrastructure provides the high availability resources with dynamic and on-demand configuration. The proposed methodology supports VM clustering process to place and allocate VM based on the requesting task size with bandwidth level to enhance the efficiency and availability. The proposed clustering process is classified as preclustering and postclustering based on the migration. Task and bandwidth classification process classifies tasks with adequate bandwidth for execution in a VM cluster. The mapping of bandwidth to VM is done based on the availability of the VM in the cluster. The VM clustering process uses different performance parameters like lifetime of VM, utilization of VM, bucket size, and task execution time. The main objective of the proposed VM clustering is that it maps the task with suitable VM with bandwidth for achieving high availability and reliability. It reduces task execution and allocated time when compared to existing algorithms.

The concept Cloud computing has not only reshaped the field of distributed systems but also fundamentally changed how business potential extends today. In recent advancements, Cloud computing applications are provided as services to end-users. The application services hosted under Cloud computing model have complex provisioning, configuration, and deployment requirements How to use Cloud computing resources efficiently and gain the maximum profits with efficient utilization of resources is one of the Cloud computing service providers' ultimate goals. Repetitive evaluation of the performance of Cloud provisioning policies, application workload models, and resources performance models in dynamic system are difficult to achieve and rather a time consuming and costly approach. To overcome this challenge, Cloud analyst simulator based on Cloud Sim has been proposed which enables the modeling and simulation in cloud's ambience. The objective of this paper is to prove that the choice of VM Scheduling Policy in Cloud computing model significantly improves the application performance under resource and service demand variations. We will discuss different Virtual Machine (VM) Scheduling Policies implemented and their performance analysis in Virtual environment of cloud computing in order to achieve better Quality of Service (QoS).

Stochastic scheduling for variation-aware virtual machine placement in a cloud computing CPS

Cloud computing is a new computation technology that provides services to consumers and businesses. The main idea of Cloud computing is to present software and hardware services through the Internet to the users and organizations at all levels. In Cloud computing, the users pay for the services, which means a usage-based payment system is used in this technology. Using virtualization technology in computation resources enables the appropriate utilization of resources in cloud computing. One of the most significant challenging issues in virtualization technology is the placement of optimal virtual machines on physical machines in cloud data centers. The placement of virtual machines comprises a process wherein virtual machines are mapped onto physical machines in cloud data centers. Optimal deployment leads to the reduction in power consumption, optimal use of resources, traffic reduction in data centers, costs reduction, and efficiency enhancement of the data center in the cloud. The present article proposed a new approach using a combination of the Sine–Cosine Algorithm and Salp Swarm Algorithm as discrete multi-objective and chaotic functions for optimal virtual machine placement. The first goal of the proposed algorithm was to reduce the power consumption in cloud data centers by condensing the number of active physical machines. The second goal was to reduce the waste of resources and manage it by optimally virtual machine placement on physical machines in cloud data centers. The third objective was to minimize and reduce Service Level Agreement among the active physical machines in cloud data centers. The proposed method prevent the increase in the migration of virtual machines onto physical machines. Ultimately, the results obtained from the proposed algorithm were compared with those of previous akin algorithms in the literature, including First Fit, Virtual Machine Placement Ant Colony System, and Modified Best Fit Decreasing. The proposed scheme is tested using Amazon EC2 Instances and the result indicated that the proposed algorithm performs better than the existing algorithms for various performance metrics.

Virtualization has been used in cloud computing to build multiple Virtual Machines (VMs) on a single physical machine, which enables computing resources partition and improving the physical resources utilization efficiency. However, the use of virtualization brings new challenge in reliability modeling for cloud computing. For example, when server failure occurs, all VMs co-located on the server cannot be operated, which is a typical common cause failure (CCFs). Since the task is executed by VMs, the states of VMs decide whether cloud computing can accomplish the given task. This paper proposes a new reliability model for cloud computing considering both server failures and VMs failures. Both fault tree and state-space models are used to solve this problem, and to reduce the computational complexity, a simplified method is provided to reduce the number of states.

Cloud computing(CC) delivers multiple services to users by processing complex tasks through internet connections to serve as a dynamic, dependable, and flexible computing solution. With the increased Internet speed, the user demands to perform many tasks through computing provided by cloud virtual machines (VMs) created in heterogeneous servers. The complexity of cloud computing(CC) increases through the diversity of servers and the increased demand for resources to perform more tasks, which makes the cloud data center(CDC) unbalanced in load. Therefore, future cloud systems will require more effective resource management(RM) methods to balance load and improve Quality of Service (QoS). This paper proposes KMPPVM-DRM, a dynamic clustering and scheduling approach for VM resource allocation(RA) based on the KMeans++ algorithm. VMs are clustered into three groups (high, medium, low) according to their real-time normalized CPU and RAM weights, using weighting parameters α = 0.6 and β = 0.4. Tasks are categorized into three levels based on length and mapped to appropriate VM clusters. Within each cluster, a Utilization-Level Comparator (ULC) dynamically selects the optimal VM for task execution. The experimental results were conducted using CloudSim, with 5 and 10 VMs and task counts ranging from 1000 to 10000. The proposed model was compared with PSO, ACO, and DBSCAN algorithms using execution time, average start time, and average finish time. Results show that with 10 VMs, the proposed model achieved a harmonic mean execution time of 886.72 ms, compared to 4102.99 ms (PSO), 4672.25 ms (ACO), and 3071.51 ms (DBSCAN). It also attained the lowest harmonic mean start and finish times of 166.41 ms and 167.19 ms, respectively. Relative reduction in execution time against DBSCAN ranged from 69.90% to 71.52%, with start and finish time improvements between 52.65% and 81.51%.To ensure statistical reliability, a paired t-test confirmed that the performance improvements were statistically significant (p < 0.05) across all task sizes. The findings confirm that KMPPVM-DRM enhances resource allocation(RA) efficiency and scheduling effectiveness, maintaining balanced loads even with limited resources (e.g., only 5 VMs) and outperforming PSO, ACO, and DBSCAN in all tested scenarios.

Cloud Computing has become the most popular distributed computing environment because it does not require any user level management and controlling on the low-level implementation of the system. However, efficient resource provisioning is a key challenge for cloud computing and resolving such kind of problem can reduce under or over utilization of resources, increase user satisfaction by serving more users during peak hours, reduce implementation cost for providers and service cost for users. Existing works on cloud computing focuses to accurate estimation of the capacity needs, static or dynamic VM (Virtual Machine) creation and scheduling. But significant amount of time is required to create and destroy VMs which could be used to serve more user requests. In this paper, an adaptive QoS (Quality of Service) aware VM provisioning mechanism is developed that ensures efficient utilization of the system resources. The VM for similar type of requests has been recycled so that the VM creation time can be minimized and used to serve more user requests. In the proposed model, QoS is ensured by serving all the tasks within the requirements described in SLA. Tasks are separated using multilevel queue and the most urgent task is given high priority. The simulation-based experimental results shows that a great number of tasks can be served compared to others which will help to satisfy customers during the peak hour.

The textbook provides a coherent overview of the key principles and current trends in the field of cloud computing. The first part outlines its historical evolution and explains the technical concepts of each cloud system. It gradually introduces the essential building blocks needed to understand cloud computing as a whole (covering virtualization concepts, virtual machines and hypervisors, container-based virtualization, and the basics of virtual networking and virtual storage). Building on this foundation, it presents the concepts of cloud technologies, including service delivery models (e.g. Infrastructure as a Service, Platform as a Service, and Software as a Service) and cloud deployment types (e.g. private, public, hybrid, and multi-cloud). The second part focuses on approaches that currently shape modern cloud-native systems, such as microservice architectures, serverless and event-driven computing, edge computing, and infrastructure as code. The textbook emphasizes motivation, intuitive explanations, and practical connections, including a discussion of trade-offs along with design decisions associated with the presented approaches. Keywords: cloud computing, virtualization, virtual machines, containers, virtual networks, virtual storage, microservices, serverless computing, edge computing, infrastructure as code.

In today's rapidly changing field of Management Information Systems (MIS) one problem faced by organizations is the consumption of storage capacity due to the growing base of software assets. Research has shown that very few firms effectively monitor program usage. Storage management issues arise due to the fact that many of the programs occupying valuable storage space are used infrequently. In this dissertation, we apply Simon's model of information usage in order to model the dynamic behavior of program usage. This methodology enables organizations to identify the changing usage frequencies of software assets. We propose a classification scheme which MIS personnel can use in order to effectively monitor their program usage tendencies. This classification scheme may then serve as a basis for storage allocation decision-making. Through a study of the dynamic behavior of programs, we have formulated a minimum cost model for hierarchical storage allocation. We will show the value of incorporating dynamic usage frequencies into algorithms which have traditionally considered only a static view.

Cloud computing and big data: Technologies and applications

As a technology, cloud computing has become an IT buzzword for the past few years. Cloud computing has often been used with synonymous terms such as software as a service, platform as a service, and infrastructure as a service (IaaS). Cloud computing has the potential to advance research discoveries by making data and computing resources readily available at an unprecedented economy of scale and with tremendous scalability. This paper discusses the importance of QoS and Iaas performance in cloud computing. The results of a quantitative evaluation are presented into the performance overheads of propagating virtual machine (VM) images to physical resources, at the Iaas layer and then accessing the images, via a Hypervisor's virtual block I/O device. Two virtual infrastructure managers are evaluated: Nimbus and OpenNebula, alongside two VM managers: XEN and KVM. Nimbus is found to outperform OpenNebula, while XEN outperforms KVM in the majority of cases. Conclusions are drawn from the results on the suitability of these technologies for data-intensive applications and applications requiring highly dynamic resource sets, where making an uninformed decision on what technology to use could prevent an application reaching its full potential, once deployed onto a cloud.