Vadara: Predictive Elasticity for Cloud Applications

Despite the promising application of cloud computing within government organisations, determining the barriers to the successful implementation of cloud computing remains a major challenge. Often, government organisations face formidable barriers to fully adopting cloud computing functions. These barriers include organisational culture issues, a weak application of service-level agreements (SLAs), compliance issues, interoperability and integration issues, the lack of an organisational strategy, cost calculation methods, cloud service availability, and cloud data security and privacy, as well as insufficient trust in providers. Tackling these barriers while meeting the specifications of government cloud computing involves architectural requirements and mechanisms. In addition, the nature of cloud ecosystem operation and its alignment with appropriate strategies are known to be complex, also considering the growing desire for governance solutions. Although researchers and organisations have recognised cloud computing obstacles prior to the cloud implementation stage, fewer efforts have been made to investigate cloud barriers in-depth during and after cloud implementation projects or when introducing governance solutions. This might partly be attributable to inadequate enterprise requirements for addressing cloud barriers, the complexity of government cloud specifications, and the lack of involvement by cloud stakeholders, such as providers and consumers. Thus, the aim of this dissertation is to develop a governance method consisting of the generation and testing of architectural requirements to overcome dominant cloud barriers and improve cloud computing functionalities in the implementation stage. To achieve this, the roles of related cloud providers and consumers have been investigated. The study was guided by activities of The Open Group Architecture Framework (TOGAF) Architecture Development Method (ADM) to design related architectural requirements that would provide best practices for the development of the governance method. Using a sequential, exploratory mixed method, multiple qualitative case studies on the role of cloud providers were conducted to explore which and how architectural requirements are suitable and applicable for addressing the identified cloud barriers. Afterwards, a quantitative survey study was performed to examine and validate the findings from the qualitative phase and to discover the role of cloud consumers in tackling cloud barriers. The utilisation of dual perspectives, from cloud providers and consumers, to design and measure the suitability and applicability of the architectural requirements is a substantial theoretical contribution in the field of enterprise information systems and cloud governance. Both cloud providers and consumers in the selected research context balanced their roles in the composition of cloud ecosystem projects, reducing complexity and enabling cooperative solutions for handling cloud barriers with different levels of emphasis and prioritisation. The results of this thesis provide significant guidance in eliciting architectural requirements as well as in their successful contribution to addressing the 10 identified cloud barriers in the selected context. Seeking a cloud provider’s perspective through multiple case studies resulted in 24 confirmed, newly emerged architectural requirements and 48 sub-requirements for best practices to support Information Technology (IT) managers and practitioners during the implementation of government cloud projects. From the point of view of the cloud service consumer, statistical evidence showed that the architectural requirements proved to be relevant and applicable and resulted in the validation of only eight important cloud constructs with a scale of 36 architectural requirements. The results at the governance level also produced a clear method that can enhance the realisation of value when business/IT strategies and EA governance practices both take place in cloud projects. The governance method also consists of a set of architectural requirements to support managing and controlling cloud computing implementation projects with related stakeholders and change management initiatives. The architectural requirements have been modelled via the ArchiMate 3.0 modelling language as unique and beneficial contributions for the enhancement of enterprise architecture practices. This thesis thereby introduces a novel cloud governance method with clear mechanisms and practices to serve as crucial resources for related organisations, decision-makers, business practitioners and researchers.

Cloud computing is a promising technology, where the infrastructure, developing platform, software and storage are delivered as a service. With the development of cloud computing, more and more cloud service providers emerge. However, there are no metrics can be referred to compare these providers, so it is difficult for cloud consumers to select the most reliable providers or resources. Thus we present a platform of Services Level Agreement (SLA) in cloud computing. In the platform, we propose a Reputation System to evaluate the reliability of providers or resources to address this challenge, and we also propose a SLA template pool in order to make the SLA negotiation between cloud providers and cloud consumers become more equitable, transparent and convenient.

Accessing data from social networks using cloud computing has been adopted by many IT enthusiasts. It allows easy access to data and easy sending of data for communication purposes. For many social network users, cloud computing can simplify processes and save time and money. This article defines cloud computing and shows how one can quickly, safely and easily access data. It also discusses how cloud computing solutions could be beneficial to libraries in these basic areas: technology and acquisition.Today’s more libraries and social networks are joining the cloud. But despite the numerous social networks and data acquisition sites demand for data are still escalating—as they always will. To be able to access data conveniently today’s data competitiveness users of search engines must carefully scrutinize various libraries as well as social media to ensure that they match key data and communication needs and deliver intended results in the most efficient and cost-effective way. To meet these challenges, IT organizations are increasingly moving away from a device-centric view of IT, to a view that is application-, information- and people-centric. Cloud computing aligns with this new world view. Cloud computing technology is enabling IT to do more with the infrastructure that already exists, as well as adding new ways to expand capacity quickly and economically by using external cloud computing resources. This technology is enabling IT managers to treat infrastructure as a common substrate on which they can provision services to users faster in a much more flexible and cost-effective way –without having to re-design or add to the underlying infrastructure. Given the benefits of cloud computing, its broad appeal is not surprising. However, this new approach does raise some concerns. Chief among them is securing data in the cloud. This white paper will briefly review the basic fundamentals of cloud computing and describe how virtualization are enabling enterprises to move toward a flexible, federated computing model with a cohesive mix of private external and internal cloud environments. It then discusses the security implications of cloud computing and provides insights into addressing them, and offers a view of security best practices to adopt when considering cloud services.Cloud computing has become an increasingly popular means of delivering valuable, IT-enabled business services. Adopting cloud technology can be an affordable way to get access to a dynamically scalable, virtualized computing environment. Optimal IT hardware, software, expertise and infrastructure management resources that may not otherwise be available from a cost perspective can be rapidly deployed and easily scaled. Processes, applications and services can be available on demand, regard-less of the user location or device. The cloud provider is responsible for the environment, so organizations can make use of resources for short periods of time without having to maintain the environment when it is not being used. While cloud computing models are attractive because of their flexibility and cost effectiveness, certain challenges must be addressed in order to provide a viable option to traditional data services. First and foremost is the issue of security. The externalized aspect of outsourcing can make it harder to maintain data integrity and privacy, support data and service availability, demonstrate compliance, and secure highly available access to applications and information. In short, cloud computing can present an added level of risk. Organizations must therefore establish trust relationships with their cloud computing providers and understand risk in terms of how these providers implement, deploy, and manage security on their behalf. Whether delivered as part of the service or as specific components added in, your cloud provider should address the fundamentals of security and risk management through a comprehensive approach.

The availability and advancements of cloud computing service models such as IaaS, SaaS, and PaaS; introducing on-demand self-service, auto scaling, easy maintenance, and pay as you go, has dramatically transformed the way organizations design and operate their datacenters. However, some organizations still have many concerns like: security, governance, lack of expertise, and migration. The purpose of this paper is to discuss the cloud computing customers’ opinions, feedbacks, attitudes, and emotions towards cloud computing services using sentiment analysis. The associated aim, is to help people and organizations to understand the benefits and challenges of cloud services from the general public’s perspective view as well as opinions about existing cloud providers, focusing on three main cloud providers: Azure, Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Google Cloud. The methodology used in this paper is based on sentiment analysis applied to the tweets that were extracted from social media platform (Twitter) via its search API. We have extracted a sample of 11,000 tweets and each cloud provider has almost similar proportion of the tweets based on relevant hashtags and keywords. Analysis starts by combining the tweets in order to find the overall polarity about cloud computing, then breaking the tweets to find the specific polarity for each cloud provider. Bing and NRC Lexicons are employed to measure the polarity and emotion of the terms in the tweets. The overall polarity classification of the tweets across all cloud providers shows 68.5% positive and 31.5% negative percentages. More specifically, Azure shows 63.8% positive and 36.2% negative tweets, Google Cloud shows 72.6% positive and 27.4% negative tweets and AWS shows 69.1% positive and 30.9% negative tweets.

Cloud computing has evolved to emerge the most topical IT paradigm in recent times. Cloud computing is rapidly transforming the IT landscape. On a pay-as-you-use basis, cloud consumers can access resources, applications and infrastructure provided by cloud providers. Such access could be in form of applications already deployed by cloud providers for use by the cloud users. It could be in form of the capability to develop and deploy user applications using services of a cloud provider. In addition, massive storage infrastructure is available for database and data supplied by the user. The cloud has several unique architectures and many more are still evolving. The primary ones are the SaaS, PaaS and the IaaS that can be deployed on private, public, community and hybrid clouds. This paper examines present developments in the cloud computing architecture and presents guidance for additional research. Papers published in journals, conferences, white papers were analyzed. The objective of this present work is to identify, examine and explain the current trends and development in cloud computing architecture. However, only 13% of the papers examined discussed Others-as-a-Service, while only 26% of the papers reviewed considered issues relating to the major actors involved in cloud computing. This will beneficial to cloud providers, users, and researchers alike

SummaryEach cloud service provider provides only an interface of its own cloud infrastructure for enabling clients to use its cloud resources. However, there is a number of difficulties for cloud providers to ensure proper functioning. One of the main problems of a cloud provider is the lack of resources to support a huge number of on‐demand resources provisioning. Thus, resources cannot be distributed among different cloud providers since the federation is not the basic operation of the cloud provider. The most efficient way to overcome this problem is to extend the interface's cloud provider with an automatic negotiation to dynamically form the best agreement between the different cloud providers based on the service level agreement. In this article, we propose an extension for the Open Cloud Computing Interface which is the standardized interface for the cloud computing to support the automatic negotiation between the different cloud providers. To prove the efficiency and the effectiveness of our approach, we implement a prototype to evaluate the key presented in this article.

Cloud provider is central processing with shared resources to serve the vendors on demand over the internet where, Cloud model is divided into deployment and service model. In this paper, we address the service model especially privacy where, the privacy allows customers to ensure that their data in cloud not access by unauthorized persons. We implement a novel approach called multi-level security using covert channel to achieve privacy through cloud computing (which we coin it MLSCPC) that enables cloud provider to protect user information from unauthorized persons. We use covert channel to enable cloud provider and customers to communicate in the existence of unauthorized people (e.g. attackers). We have developed a prototype of approach to evaluate its security, feasibility and performance. Our results show that cloud provider can grant customers resources in acceptable time and low computation overhead. Also, attackers don't affect our approach whereby, the cloud provider can grant resources to customers in existent of attackers.

<p>Numerical weather prediction (NWP) systems nowadays need to be capable of providing not only high-quality deterministic forecasts, but also information about forecast uncertainty.  The ensemble forecast technique is commonly used to provide an estimation of forecast uncertainty.  Since a great deal of the forecast uncertainty comes from dynamical and physical processes not resolved or explicitly represented numerically, there is a need to correctly quantify and simulate the uncertainty associated with these processes as required by the ensemble forecast technique.</p><p>To address this need, we have developed a new stochastic physics scheme for simulating the uncertainty in parameterizations in the NOAA Unified Forecast System (UFS).  This scheme is derived from the connection in mathematical physics between the Mori-Zwanzig formalism and multidimensional Langevin processes.  It follows the correspondence principle, a philosophical guideline for new theory development, such that it can be shown that the previously implemented stochastic uncertainty quantification schemes in the UFS are particular cases of this scheme.  We will show how we have used this scheme to simulate uncertainty at the process level of unresolved dynamics and physics in the UFS.  We will also present a preliminary performance comparison of previously-implemented stochastic physics schemes with the newly-developed process-level scheme in the UFS medium-range ensemble prediction</p>

The continuing advancements in microprocessor technologies are putting more and more computing power into small devices. Today smartphones are especially popular. Nevertheless, for resource intensive tasks such devices are still too constrained. However, the simultaneous trend of providing computing resources as a commodity on a pay-as-you-go basis (cloud computing) combined with such mobile devices facilitates interesting applications: Mobile clients can simply outsource resource intensive tasks to the cloud. Since clients have to pay a cloud provider (CP) for consumed resources, e.g. instance hours of virtual machines, clients may consider it as privacy intrusive that the CP is able to record the activity pattern of users, i.e. how often and how much resources are consumed by a specific client. In this paper we present a solution to this dilemma which allows clients to anonymously consume resources of a CP such that the CP is not able to track users' activity patterns. We present a scenario which integrates up-to-date security enhanced platforms as processing nodes and a recent cloud payment scheme together with a concrete implementation supporting the practicality of the proposed approach.

Cloud computing has emerged as a new computing paradigm, with provisioning model generally consisting of cloud service providers (CSPs), network service providers (NSPs), and end users. The associated economics has opened up a new research area; and with the expansion of the cloud computing market, the relationship between CSPs and NSPs, is changing profoundly. In addition to providing the default network services, traditional NSPs, in attempt to compete with CSPs, have started offering cloud services to end users. Though much progress has been made toward addressing competitions among CSPs themselves or among NSPs themselves, few studies have focused on the competition between CSPs and NSPs. In this paper, we investigate the problem of insufficient studies on the competition between CSPs and NSPs by presenting a new economic model to characterize the competition between CSPs and NSPs, and by conducting thorough theoretical analysis as well as numeric experiments to validate the proposed model. We believe, based on results, that the proposed economic model is general and feasible, and thus is applicable to modeling the competition among service providers in cloud computing market.

ABSTRACTSecurity and privacy are fundamental concerns in cloud computing both in terms of legal complications and user trust. Cloud computing is a new computing paradigm, aiming to provide reliable, customized, and guaranteed computing dynamic environment for end users. However, the existing security and privacy issues in the cloud still present a strong barrier for users to adopt cloud computing solutions. This paper investigates the security and privacy challenges in cloud computing in order to explore methods that improve the users’ trust in the adaptation of the cloud. Policing as a Service can be offered by the cloud providers with the intention of empowering users to monitor and guard their assets in the cloud. This service is beneficial both to the cloud providers and the users. However, at first, the cloud providers may only be able to offer basic auditing services due to undeveloped tools and applications. Similar to other services delivered in the cloud, users can purchase this service to gain some control over their data. The subservices of the proposed service can be Privacy as a Service and Forensics as a Service. These services give users a sense of transparency and control over their data in the cloud while better security and privacy safeguards are sought.

Cloud computing has transformed corporate and consumer lives. Cloud computing may save startups and businesses money and improve services. Independent developers may build global apps and services, share, and analyze data at scales formerly reserved for well-funded projects. Internet users may quickly create, share, and preserve digital content beyond their devices' computing capabilities. The cloud provider owns and maintains computer resources in cloud computing. Browser-based apps like Netflix, third-party data storage for images and other digital files like iCloud or Dropbox, and third-party servers used to support a company, research, or personal project's computer architecture are examples of such resources. This chapter discusses many topics related to cloud computing, such as: Cloud computing term, entities, technologies, delivery models, environments, and platforms, advantages and disadvantages of cloud computing, benefits of cloud computing, using cloud computing, risks and security concerns, cloud computing ethics, challenges, and costs, and research directions.

Cloud computing security (sometimes referred to simply as security) is an evolving sub- domain of Computer security, Network security and, more broadly, Information security It refers to a broad set of policies, technologies, and controls deployed to protect data, applications, and the associated infrastructure of cloud computing. Cloud security is not to be confused with security software offerings that are cloud-based (a.k.a. security-as-a-service).There are a number of security issues/concerns associated with cloud computing but these issues fall into two broad categories: Security issues faced by cloud providers (organizations providing software, platform, or infrastructure as a service via the cloud) and security issues faced by their customers. In most cases, the provider must ensure that their infrastructure is secure and that their clients' data and applications are protected while the customer must ensure that the provider has taken the proper security measures to protect their information. The extensive use of virtualization in implementing cloud infrastructure brings unique security concerns for customers or tenants of a public cloud service. Virtualization alters the relationship between the OS and underlying hardware - be it computing, storage or even networking. This introduces an additional layer - virtualization - that itself must be properly configured, managed and secured .Specific concerns include the potential to compromise the virtualization software, or hyper visor. While these concerns are largely theoretical, they do exist. Cloud computing offers great potential to improve productivity and reduce costs, but at the same time it possesses many security risks. In this paper we identify the possible security attacks on clouds including: Denial of Service attack, Authentication attack Man-in-the Middle attack, Wrapping attacks, Malware-Injection attacks, Flooding attacks, Browser attacks, and also Accountability checking problems. We identify the root causes of these attacks and propose specific solutions. In this paper, the authors discuss security issues for cloud computing and present a layered framework for secure clouds and then focus on two of the layers, i.e., the storage layer and the data layer. In particular, the authors discuss a scheme for secure third party publications of documents in a cloud. Next, the paper will converse secure federated query processing with map Reduce and Hardtop, and discuss the use of secure co-processors for cloud computing. Finally, the authors discuss XACML implementation for Hardtop and discuss their beliefs that building trusted applications from untrusted components will be a major aspect of secure cloud computing. Keywords : Accountability, Authentication attacks, Computer security, Cloud Computing, Flooding attacks, Hypervisor, Virtualization, Wrapping attacks, Browser attacks, secure clouds.

The advance of edge computing pushes computing functionalities to the network edge and brings lucrative opportunities for edge operators (EOs) to cater the users with low latency requirement. Unlike in cloud computing, edge servers have limited computing capacity and require a proper resource planning. To avoid loss of potential profit, a promising way is to outsource cloud resources from a public cloud with additional cost when the edge computing capacity is insufficient to meet the real-time demands. Besides, the uncertainty of future demands also affects EOs' profits. It's essential to consider the interaction among market participants with different risk attitudes. To this end, we study multiple risk-averse EOs with one risk-neutral Cloud Provider (CP) in an edge computing market, where each EO competes to serve the users by determining the optimal resource provision strategies given the demand and the outsource price charged by the CP, and the CP sets the price based on the best responses of the EOs. We model the interaction between EOs and CP as a two stage Stackelberg game, and employ a data-driven optimization approach to characterize the uncertainty. We explore the existence and uniqueness of subgame Nash equilibrium, and find the equilibrium based on the Sample Average Approximation (SAA) method. Extensive simulations using real-world cluster data traces verify the effectiveness of the proposed method.

Until today, Cloud providers only offer a limited set of non-negotiable service levels to their customers. Most often these service levels are expressed as guarantees for availability together with the offer to have access to a virtualised environment with a certain performance the customer may select from a number of predefined configurations. This simplifies the life of the provider, e.g., in terms of effort to maintain an adequate infrastructure, or regarding the effort for reducing the risk violating Service Level Agreements (SLAs) with its customer. In consequence, the current practice is slanted towards the benefit of the provider and ignores more specific requirements of its customers, e.g. regarding data protection and related guarantees. An analysis of the underlying problems shows two major fields to be worked on for solving the problem: Firstly, each provider uses its own proprietary technology for managing SLAs throughout their life-cycles. However, first standards are available and could be employed allowing the customer to use a single standard interface to negotiate with several providers. Secondly, there is neither a common set of terms to describe Cloud customers requirements regarding the Cloud services requested, nor, the back side of the medal, there is a common set of terms to describe the Quality of Service (QoS) of the Cloud providers' offerings. The focus of the presented work is (i) on the standard technology for negotiating and creating SLAs and (ii) the common terms and metrics describing providers' offerings and customers' requirements. Without these terms mapping the customers' requirements to cloud providers' offerings is a tedious manual and error-prone process and resulting SLAs will remain rudimentary. Additionally, both providers and their customers would benefit from more sophisticated and negotiable Service Level Agreements using existing standards. These SLAs are both (i) binding and monitorable agreements between the customer and the provider covering the customers' requirements and (ii) the basis for a QoS-aware Cloud resource management on the side of the provider including provisioning of physical machines and optimised allocation of virtual machines. Besides more traditional QoS aspects, terms related to Cloud Federation, Data Protection or Security Level Agreements are covered. Customers may use standards compliant agreement templates with the providers' offerings to select suitable providers for starting the negotiation to the extent the provider allows in the template. During the negotiation the provider may take into account the actual degree of capacity utilisation of its infrastructure and active SLAs, and may use the SLA resulting from a successful negotiation to further optimise its infrastructure through application and VM consolidation. The work presented in this thesis covers about a decade of research starting in the environment of Grid computing and ending with today's Cloud computing.