Private cloud infrastructures are now widely deployed and adopted across technology industries and research institutions. Although cloud computing has emerged as a reality, it is now known that a single cloud provider cannot fully satisfy complex user requirements. This has resulted in a growing interest in developing hybrid cloud solutions that bind together distinct and heterogeneous cloud infrastructures. In this paper we describe the orchestration approach for heterogeneous clouds that has been implemented and used within the INDIGO-DataCloud project. This orchestration model uses existing open-source software like OpenStack and leverages the OASIS Topology and Specification for Cloud Applications (TOSCA) open standard as the modeling language. Our approach uses virtual machines and Docker containers in an homogeneous and transparent way providing consistent application deployment for the users. This approach is illustrated by means of two different use cases in different scientific communities, implemented using the INDIGO-DataCloud solutions.
However, providers and users perceive that lower level (i.e. infrastructure provision and management) standards hinder the adoption of cloud infrastructures @cite_41 . Cloud technologies and frameworks tend to have a fast development pace, adding new functionalities as they evolve, whereas standards' evolution is sometimes not as fast as the underlying technologies. This has been perceived as a negative fact limiting the potential of a given cloud infrastructure, that sees its functionality and flexibility decreased. On top of this, infrastructure management is also perceived too low level when moving to more service-centric approaches that require not only the deployment and management of services, but also all their operational concerns (like fault or error handling, auto-scaling, etc.) @cite_80 .
@cite_41 @cite_80
2031780258 2152942310 2159362967 2138583691
Improving resource provisioning of heterogeneous cloud infrastructures is an important research challenge. The wide diversity of cloud-based applications and customers with different QoS requirements have recently exhibited the weaknesses of current provisioning systems. Today's cloud infrastructures provide provisioning systems that dynamically adapt the computational power of applications by adding or releasing resources. Unfortunately, these scaling systems are fairly limited:(i) They restrict themselves to a single type of resource, (ii)they are unable to fulfill QoS requirements in face of spiky workload, and (iii) they offer the same QoS level to all their customers, independent of customer preferences such as different levels of service availability and performance. In this paper, we present an autoscaling system that overcomes these limitations by exploiting heterogeneous types of resources, and by defining multiple levels of QoS requirements. The proposed system selects a resource scaling plan according to both workload and customer requirements. Our experiments conducted on both public and private infrastructures show significant reductions in QoS-level violations when faced with highly variable workloads. A key advantage of infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) clouds is providing users on-demand access to resources. To provide on-demand access, however, cloud providers must either significantly overprovision their infrastructure (and pay a high price for operating resources with low utilization) or reject a large proportion of user requests (in which case the access is no longer on-demand). At the same time, not all users require truly on-demand access to resources. Many applications and workflows are designed for recoverable systems where interruptions in service are expected. For instance, many scientists utilize high-throughput computing (HTC)-enabled resources, such as Condor, where jobs are dispatched to available resources and terminated when the resource is no longer available. We propose a cloud infrastructure that combines on-demand allocation of resources with opportunistic provisioning of cycles from idle cloud nodes to other processes by deploying backfill virtual machines (VMs). For demonstration and experimental evaluation, we extend the Nimbus cloud computing toolkit to deploy backfill VMs on idle cloud nodes for processing an HTC workload. Initial tests show an increase in IaaS cloud utilization from 37.5 to 100 during a portion of the evaluation trace but only 6.39 overhead cost for processing the HTC workload. We demonstrate that a shared infrastructure between IaaS cloud providers and an HTC job management system can be highly beneficial to both the IaaS cloud provider and HTC users by increasing the utilization of the cloud infrastructure (thereby decreasing the overall cost) and contributing cycles that would otherwise be idle to processing HTC jobs. Applications with a dynamic workload demand need access to a flexible infrastructure to meet performance guarantees and minimize resource costs. While cloud computing provides the elasticity to scale the infrastructure on demand, cloud service providers lack control and visibility of user space applications, making it difficult to accurately scale the underlying infrastructure. Thus, the burden of scaling falls on the user. In this paper, we propose a new cloud service, Dependable Compute Cloud (DC2), that automatically scales the infrastructure to meet the user-specified performance requirements. DC2 employs Kalman filtering to automatically learn the (possibly changing) system parameters for each application, allowing it to proactively scale the infrastructure to meet performance guarantees. DC2 is designed for the cloud it is application-agnostic and does not require any offline application profiling or benchmarking. Our implementation results on OpenStack using a multi-tier application under a range of workload traces demonstrate the robustness and superiority of DC2 over existing rule-based approaches. SUMMARY Public Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) clouds such as Amazon, GoGrid and Rackspace deliver computational resources by means of virtualisation technologies. These technologies allow multiple independent virtual machines to reside in apparent isolation on the same physical host. Dynamically scaling applications running on IaaS clouds can lead to varied and unpredictable results because of the performance interference effects associated with co-located virtual machines. Determining appropriate scaling policies in a dynamic non-stationary environment is non-trivial. One principle advantage exhibited by IaaS clouds over their traditional hosting counterparts is the ability to scale resources on-demand. However, a problem arises concerning resource allocation as to which resources should be added and removed when the underlying performance of the resource is in a constant state of flux. Decision theoretic frameworks such as Markov Decision Processes are particularly suited to decision making under uncertainty. By applying a temporal difference, reinforcement learning algorithm known as Q-learning, optimal scaling policies can be determined. Additionally, reinforcement learning techniques typically suffer from curse of dimensionality problems, where the state space grows exponentially with each additional state variable. To address this challenge, we also present a novel parallel Q-learning approach aimed at reducing the time taken to determine optimal policies whilst learning online. Copyright © 2012 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.