Monitoring "grid-cloud" model using complex event processing (CEP)

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to conduct empirical investigation of value co-creation phenomena in IT services outsourcing. This survey based research enabled to identify antecedents of value co-creation and their impact on value outcomes. Design/methodology/approach – This empirical study identifies 25 drivers of value co-creation in IT outsourcing services. These drivers were identified from reported literature and by studying IT project reports. The data were collected from client and supplier organizations followed by verification of the drivers (using PCA and CFA methodologies) that contribute significantly to value co-creation in the IT services outsourcing domain. Furthermore, using SEM and linear regression, the authors have verified the strength of their relationships with value co-creation. Findings – This research is subjected to exploratory factor analysis, which resulted in six antecedents of value co-creation in IT services outsourcing. These antecedents include alliance relationship, strategic intent, service actualization, intrapreneurship, collective capabilities, and resource management. The alliance relationship, strategic intent, service actualization, and intrapreneurship are found to be significant for value co-creation. While collective capabilities as a standalone was not significant, the relationship of collective capabilities to value co-creation has achieved significance under the influence of alliance relationship, strategic intent, and other antecedents – when tested and hypothesized through the SEM path model. Research limitations/implications – The research has the following limitations. The antecedents identified are contextual. The potential illustrative, but not exhaustive reasons, for the change of the context may be due to contract duration, age of the project, relationship maturity, expected value outcome from both the parties, etc. The drivers identified in this research are applicable only to IT services (IT and ITES outsourcing). They cannot be generalized to other B2B outsourcing relationship. The authors propose the conducting of separate research to identify the priorities of these antecedents for different types of outsourcing as well different types of value outcomes. Practical implications – This study has added to the knowledge on value co-creation in IT services outsourcing relationships through empirical modeling. From the perspective practitioners of IT industry, this work brings rich information of what are the drivers to value co-creation and their significance on value outcomes in IT services outsourcing. It can provide guidelines to both clients and service providers of similar industry to assess their current practices for value co-creation and re-prioritize their activities and budgets based on the significance of value based benefits. Moreover, practitioners in the IT services industry can use these value drivers and understand the antecedents for value co-creation. As this work is from a dual perspective, both clients and suppliers can assess the applicability of these drivers and antecedents and adopt them to realize mutual value. Originality/value – In the past, researchers have focussed on value after it was created and shared among the respective relationship partners, and very few emphasized the need for proactive identification of the antecedents of value co-creation. Researchers have emphasized on the need for an empirical approach, because most of the published studies are theoretical and conceptual in nature. Hence, the significant contribution of this empirical study is to validate the value co-creation drivers identified from literature and qualitative study (case studies) with IT industry practitioners (no. 256) across the globe and the relevance of antecedents to B2B IT services outsourcing body of knowledge.

Cloud computing is the notion for delivering access to scalable on-demand computing resources and IT services. The resource management system in IaaS Clouds dynamically allocates the resources based on predefined customers' needs using Service Level Agreements (SLAs) between the Cloud provider and customers. One of the challenges of resource management is to continuously monitor resource utilization, manage, and adjust these resources in real-time fashion to meet the SLAs while not over provisioning resources. Though, there exist numerous Cloud monitoring solutions, they are often highly specialized and restrict the administrator in defining automation rules. Our work aims to develop a framework based on concepts from Complex Event Processing (CEP) and data stream processing where data from various primitive metrics streams are collected and treated as event streams (e.g., from CPU, memory, and disk sensors). By automatically detecting complex patterns and relationships among these primitive events, we can detect and understand more high-level situations from the information provided by sensor steams. In this paper, we describe our CEP-based resource monitoring framework and discuss a use case for implementing auto scaling facilities to the Proxmox platform.

With the development of the computer technology and international specialization, a growing number of companies consider outsourcing as an effective method to improve the operation environment, reduce the cost, and enhance the efficiency. Despite of the many advantages comes with it, the risk in the outsourcing process should not be overlooked —for instance, the risk of invisible transactional cost escalation and unsatisfactory services from incompetent outsourcing suppliers. In this paper we propose a risk analysis model, which is based on factor analysis, for the ITO's in China. This model is also proven to be feasible and practical through an empirical analysis. Index Terms - IT outsourcing, risk analysis, factor analysis, empirical analysis 1. Introduction With the development of IT outsourcing, many experts and scholars, both demostic and international, have redirected their attention from the advantages of IT service outsourcing to the risk analysis of it. Among the numerous risk theorems that has been proposed in the area of IT service outsourcing, they mostly fall into two major categories. The first category is oriented by risk management theories and studies systematically the problems such as risk recognization, risk control, risk evaluation and risk management tools etc. The second category emphasizes in risk management and deals with more specific problems such as risk analysis, evaluation and precaution etc. It is vital for the client to choose a competent supplier during IT service outsourcing process. Scholars both demostic and international have done great amount of research on the risk of IT service outsourcing most of which, however, are based on theoretical study and lack of practical risk analysis model. This paper proposes a factor-analysis- based risk evaluation model which may have practical value for IT service supplers in China.

In 1998, Ian Foster and Carl Kesselman, together with thirty distinguished experts in high-performance computing and networking, laid the foundations of a new computing model called GRID. Their vision was introduced in the book, The GRID: Blueprint for a New Computing Infrastructure (see review, SCPE Vol. 3, No. 3 ). The editors wrote: … A computational grid is a hardware and software infrastructure that provides dependable, consistent, pervasive, and inexpensive access to high-end computational capabilities… allowing new classes of applications to emerge… as yet, we have only a preliminary understanding of what these new applications will look like. Over the next five years, Grid computing became the hottest R&D field. Academia and national labs built experimental infrastructures, new startups were established to develop Grid technologies, and the HPC giant vendors joined the party. Each one pushed in a different direction based on what and how he believed Grid computing should look. It was only a matter of time until people started to ask what the Grid is all about. A survey of ten Grid experts produced ten different answers. The question remains without a clear answer, leaving many people confused. Ian Foster picked up the gloves. In his article, What is the GRID? A three point checklist (GRIDtoday, July 22, 2002: Vol. 1, No. 6), he redefines the Grid model to reflect the trades and changes in the field during the past five years. According to Foster, a Grid is a system that: Coordinates resources that are not subject to centralized control. Uses standard, open, general-purpose protocols and interfaces. Delivers a nontrivial quality of service. But Foster's new definition could not encompass all of the Grid's approaches. Moreover, Foster explained by example what the Grid is not: A cluster management system such as Sun's Sun Grid Engine, Platform's Load Sharing Facility, or Viridian's Portable Batch System can, when installed on a parallel computer or local area network, deliver quality of service guarantees and thus constitutes a powerful Grid resource. However, such a system is not a Grid itself, due to its centralized control of the hosts that it manages Within a week the responses started to come in. The first one was from Wolfgang Gentzsch, Director of Grid computing at Sun Microsystems (GRIDtoday, August 5, 2002: Vol. 1, No. 8). Gentzsch wrote: I very much like Ian's two earlier definitions. Combined, they may provide a very generic Grid definition. The new checklist, however, reduces the potential of a wide and rich variety of Grids, with different architectures, operational models, and applications, and may miss the chance to becoming widely accepted as a standard definition of the Grid. Why do we need a definition for the Grid? Can the Grid be defined? Is a definition is necessary to the Grid's development? The Grid is an open vision and thus cannot be defined. An attempt to define the Grid can only reach the foreseen technology horizon, and this horizon is only one to two years ahead. Grid computing is a paradigm in shift. New architectures and standards are changing the shape and direction of the Grid's development. In the past year one such prominent architecture was Open Grid Services Architecture (OGSA). The OGSA is the first attempt to bridge the gap between two cyberspace worlds: the Internet and the Grid. The Internet and the Grid are two different computing models. There are people who believe that the Grid is the next generation of the Internet and the World Wide Web, saying that the Great Global Grid is still many years away. Others state that the Grid will complement, not replace, the Internet as we know it. In 1998, when the Grid blueprint was published, a new Internet language appeared called eXtensible Markup Language (XML). XML is a development tool for a new Internet computing model known as Web Services. At that time, nobody understood that there is a relationship between Web Services and the Grid. Three years past before Steve Tuecke from Argonne National Laboratory started to write a spec for Grid Services. Later, people from IBM joined the mission and together they created OGSA. The OGSA specification outlines interfaces to grid computing software that comply with Web Services standards. If adopted, Grid services such as job scheduling, authentication, failure-detection, staging of applications and data, and migration of applications and data, will all be accessed through standard Web Services architecture. OGSA is basically where Grid meets Web Services and maybe the first step towards full integration of the Internet and the Grid. The Internet appeared a decade ago. In the beginning, the Net offered primitive applications: a mailing system, ftp services, and a web of home pages. Nobody asked, What is the Internet? The years passed and new emerging Internet technologies were developed. Today we can talk on the phone over the Net, chat with friends, and video conference with colleagues on the other side of the world. New computing and business models were developed: e-commerce, e-learning, e-science, and e-you-name-it. And nobody asks what the Internet is. The Grid is a super-model, a bag of networking models associated with many types of architectures, software packages, applications, and standards. Today, when people talk about the Grid they mention Data Grids, Science Grids, and Campus Grids. And at the same time they mention Farm computing, Peer-to-peer computing, and Utility computing, among others. Ten years from now many of today's technologies will disappear and new ones will be developed. I don't know how Grid computing will look a decade from now, but I know that we will have g-commerce, g-learning, g-science, and g-chat. Nobody will ask what the Grid is. It will be obvious, just as the Internet is today. Ami Marowka The Computer Aided Design Laboratory School of Engineering and Computer Science Hebrew University of Jerusalem

IT services are subject of several maintenance operations like upgrades, reconfigurations or redeployments. Monitoring those changes is crucial to detect operator errors, which are a main source of service failures. Another challenge, which exacerbates operator errors is the increasing frequency of changes, e.g. because of continuous deployments like often performed in cloud computing. In this paper, we propose a monitoring approach to detect operator errors online in real-time by using complex event processing and anti-patterns. The basis of the monitoring approach is a novel business process modelling method, combining TOSCA and Petri nets. This model is used to derive pattern instances, which are input for a complex event processing engine in order to analyze them against the generated events of the monitored applications.

Grid computing combines the services of different computers running on often different networks to accomplish a task for an enterprise. Quality of service in grid has been one of the core areas. Achieving quality of service in grid while bringing together customer needs and issues in grid computing has not been brought together to help improve on it. This paper proposes the bringing together of customer satisfaction parameters in solving issues related to quality of services in grid computing. This has been done through studying of related works in quality of services and customer satisfaction areas while looking at issues in grid that affect quality of service either directly or indirectly. The paper has based much on already documented work from various researchers and academia. It is expected that the proposed incorporation of customer satisfaction parameters with issues in grid will enhance quality of service and improve on market share of particular enterprise, service or product. Abbrv: QoS: Quality of Service

As the complexity of application system for enterprises, an important challenge is to dynamically schedule and integrate the heterogeneous and distributed services or activities to work cooperatively and efficiently. An effective technology to resolve the problem is grid service. A grid service built on both grid computing and web services technologies is an extended Web service. An application system for enterprises is a grid service composition that consists of a collection of grid services related by data and control flow. Therefore, there is a need for modeling and analyzing techniques and tools for reliable and effective grid service composition. The Petri net based method is an idea approach. in this paper, we use a colored dynamic timed Petri net (CDTPN) to model the grid service composition. The definition of CDTPN for grid service and an algorithm to construct a composite service are proposed. We give a definition of reachable service graph and an algorithm for constructing the reachable service graph of CDTPN. Finally, we discuss the correctness and effectiveness of the grid service composition by analyzing the reachable service graph.

Grid computing provides the basic software infrastructure for integrating geographically distributed resources and services through standardized grid services. One of the key challenges to enable the broader use of grid services beyond the domain of scientific computing is the ability to perform complex tasks that require the modeling and coordination of the enactment of a number of distributed grid services. Workflow technology is a good candidate for supporting grid service flow. However, traditional workflow is static, thus unable to exploit the dynamic information available in the grid and respond to the dynamic nature of the grid. In this paper, we present an adaptive framework that provides adaptive management of grid service flows. The framework is based on an adaptive grid service flow model and is supported by an event-trigger-rule (ETR) technology that will be used to trigger rules in a distributed fashion to adapt a grid service flow to the dynamic grid environment and the changing requirements of a grid application.

The monitoring of grid environments helps administrators and users keep track of the availability and loading of resources, and the management of resources is dependent on the monitoring of information data. There is not an efficient and consistent monitoring mechanism to the manipulation of devices, resources and services in Grid computing. We propose a novel monitoring framework used to gather and retrieve monitoring information of Grid environments. The monitoring system RMCS integrates and extends the existing monitoring system using service-oriented mechanism and the common information model CIM. The RMCS defines a hierarchical structure of monitoring resources, and customizes the monitoring parameters and the display way. The adoption of CIM-based monitoring service enables compatible with other grid services such as grid portal, transaction or resource management and charging. The investigation shows that this monitoring approach provides the scalable monitoring capabilities, enables to exchange information in an unrestricted and flexible way, and improves grid performance and utilization.

This paper will discuss how and Exploration & Production Companies / National Oil Companies (NOCs) can leverage global Information technology services companies from India (or other talent surplus countries), to virtually expand the existing talent pool of the Industry. Exploration & Production industry trends, contrasts between the developed and developing markets such as India, capability of Indian IT services sector, and areas where IT services can make a contribution will be discussed. Based on the above factors, the potential of the IT services sector to build IT Solutions and create new talent for the industry will be analyzed. Outsourcing of services to Oilfield Service Providers has been one of the strategies used to solve some of the people shortage problems in the industry. This has also allowed E&P companies to focus on their ‘core competency’ which is the exploration and production of oil and gas. A similar strategy which global Exploration & Production companies are tending to adopt in Information technology is IT Services Outsourcing. This helps the companies use their existing manpower, reduce costs, as also to let IT service companies do more of the ‘digital’ type work in E&P. Although IT outsourcing may have started purely based for cost reduction, IT outsourcing now has the strategic advantage of better access to talent and capabilities1. IT service providers can help in areas like Remote management of operations, basic collaborative operations, problem solving, leveraging associated Knowledge Management, and real time Data Management - which require a mix of Exploration & Production industry domain and IT experience. An increasing number of people with such experience would be required by the Industry with the increasing importance of IT function as a strategic part of business, and with the ‘Digitization’ of many functions. The combination of a growing Exploration & Production Industry, Operators, NOCs as well as Vendors combined with the growth of the global software services sector and the availability of a large labour force in developing countries has the potential to contribute IT solutions and create an extended talent pool of professionals who can serve the global Exploration & Production industry and help solve the looming ‘crew change’ crisis.

Following their larger counterparts, an increasing number of small firms outsource their IT tasks to lower cost offshore destinations. For small firms, however, offshore outsourcing is a difficult undertaking as it involves high transaction costs. Online marketplaces for IT services, which have recently become available to small firms, make offshore IT outsourcing more accessible and manageable, although differences in the marketplace design result in varying outcomes across the marketplaces. This has consequences for an SME’s decision as to which online marketplace to use, because different markets may have different types of benefits and costs. This paper sets out to analyze some of the similarities and differences between online marketplaces for IT services and their effects for small firms. First, we analyze if and how online marketplaces reduce small firms’ transaction costs in offshore IT outsourcing. Second, we examine the effects of market entry barriers on outcomes of online marketplaces and their implications for small firms. The results indicate that online marketplaces for IT services do reduce transaction costs for small firms in offshore outsourcing across ten specific market processes. More surprising, however, is the finding that the lower market entry barriers for suppliers result in lower prices for buyers without compromising other aspects of market performance.

Cloud computing and big data: Technologies and applications

This article provides a comprehensive analysis of the global IT outsourcing market, highlighting its historical roots, current state and future prospects. The paper examines key moments and transformations in the industry, from the early days of outsourcing to its current scale. Particular attention is paid to the impact of technological innovations such as cloud computing, artificial intelligence, and blockchain on market dynamics. The article analyses how outsourcing affects countries' economies, labour markets, and social structures, with a particular focus on changes in the global distribution of jobs and economic growth. The article also includes forecasts of future market trends, taking into account current technological changes and global economic factors. In the context of rapid globalisation, the IT services market is experiencing significant growth. Global outsourcing, as a tool for business expansion and cost optimisation, is becoming a key success factor for many companies. Outsourcing allows companies to reduce costs and focus on their core competencies, which is especially important in the highly competitive IT sector. Given the rapid development of the IT sector in Ukraine, it is important to study the country's role in the global outsourcing market to assess the potential and capabilities of local professionals and companies. Thus, this topic is highly relevant, given its impact on the international economy, technology development and business strategies. Its study opens up broad prospects for analysing IT outsourcing, taking into account both global and local contexts. An important part of the article is the recommendations for various stakeholders, including outsourcing companies, service providers, policy makers and researchers. These recommendations are aimed at optimising the use of outsourcing in the IT industry, ensuring balanced and sustainable growth of the industry. The article uses data from a variety of sources, including market research, analytical reports and expert interviews, making it a valuable resource for anyone interested in the development of the global outsourcing market in the IT business.

In this paper, the results of a domain analysis are analyzed on current outsourcing situation of IT services in Iran. For this purpose a typical society of ISPs and customers consist of governmental organizations and private companies is selected, then, by gathering their points of view, challenges and obstacles to outsourcing of IT services are studied and analyzed. In order to estimate the amount of demands for establishing IDC centers in our country we used ITCI (information technology company of Iran) reports - as main national Internet provider - of in-out traffic rate and number of hosted sites. Results of this analyzing can help IT managers in recognizing current situation in the country and presenting main policies in the field of IT

This paper presents an approach for service monitoring through workflow modeling and complex event processing. Workflows allow the representation of services process interactions while complex event processing (CEP) is a concept for event driven architectures which offers an alternative solution for monitoring and supervision. In this paper we propose a methodology to combine both technologies where CEP is used to monitor workflows and to predict possible delays. A case study on medical equipment maintenance business is shown.