The latest General Assembly meeting of the 4CaaSt European Project took place in Paris, where France Telecom headquarters are located.

“The City of the Lights” witnessed a meeting with a more technical profile, as the review for year 2 at the European Commission is approaching. We employed all our time in the preparation of the demo stories that will be shown while integrating the available components (including the clustering features of OpenNebula).

Ingénieur Alexandre Gustave Eiffel must have inspired us, because the outcome of this meeting has been specially great. We are sure that the European Commission reviewers will be astonished with our project!

J.L. Vázquez-Poletti

Last week I had the pleasure to organize with Francesco Lelli and Dana Petcu the International Workshop on Clouds for Business and Business for Cloud (C4BB4C), which took place at Madrid during the 10th IEEE International Symposium on Parallel and distributed Processing with Applications (ISPA2012).

Cloud computing has acquired enough maturity to expand its field of application to business. Yet there are not only institutions, which use this paradigm in their production line, but there are also those which are offering services through the Cloud.

The Workshop intended to put together efforts done from service producers and consumers in order to make Cloud Computing provide an added value to the economy of any kind of institution. Technologies, policies and heuristics were shared, as it will be shown below. Of course, the know-how coming from other areas that would benefit Cloud Computing were not discarded.

The idea was originated at the 4CaaSt European Commission FP7 project but its success was ensured thanks to the collaboration with the mOSAIC European Commission FP7 project, where Dana Petcu is Scientific Coordinator. In fact, results from coming both projects were showcased and discussed during the Workshop.

J.L. Vázquez-Poletti

Every 2 years, The International Advanced Workshop on High Performance Computing, Grids and Clouds (HPC) takes place for shedding some light on key topics in advanced high performance computing systems. From June 25th to 29th experts in the field accomplished this with about forty invited talks.

The venue has been always the same: Gran Hotel San Michele, located at Cetraro, Italy. The hotel shares the charm of the one of the most beautiful places of South Italy.

The founder of this Workshop is Professor Lucio Grandinetti from Università della Calabria. His incredible work and dedication made the best experts to take part of HPC edition after edition.

I had the honor to participate in this event with a talk entitled “Automatic IaaS Elasticity for the PaaS Cloud of the Future” where I introduced the 4CaaSt European Commission FP7 project and our work there, providing elasticity at IaaS level. In particular I showed our three approaches: cluster management with the OpenNebula virtual infrastructure manager, a proposal for SLAs and service definition, and finally a set of admission control algorithms.

As explained before, the HPC Workshop started 20 years ago. For this reason we the participants wanted to give Professor Lucio Grandinetti a tribute in the form of a gift. I have to say it was a very emotive moment, and not only for Professor Grandinetti but for all the participants!

J.L. Vázquez-Poletti

Springer has recently published the Handbook of Cloud Computing, which describes and evaluates current state-of-the-art of cloud computing, and includes contributions from world experts in the field of cloud computing from academia, research labs and private industry.

The book is organized in four parts:

1. Technologies and Systems, where basic concepts of cloud computing and key technologies such as virtualization, storage, networking and scheduling techniques are presented
2. Architectures, evaluates several specific architectural concepts applied to cloud computing.
3. Services, describes various issues on cloud services, including types of services, service scalability, scientific services and dynamic collaborative services.
4. Applications, describes various cloud computing applications such as kowledge clouds, scientific and statistical computing, scientific data management and medical applications.

I was invited to contribute to the Handbook, and therefore, jointly my colleagues at Telefónica I+D Luis Rodero, Luis Vaquero, Alvaro Polo and Juanjo Hierro, we published the “Service Scalability Over the Cloud” article at the Services part. In the article, we review the concept of “Scalability” and how traditionally IT Systems have faced this issue. In a second part, we describe how grid and cloud computing help services to scale, and describe some techniques used in cloud scalability. As conclusion, we point out that existing large-scale applications need to be adapted to the cloud and their scalability control could not be trivial or directly could not be possible. From an early stage of design, applications must be designed having in account the scalability issue, and new development techniques and cloud-ready technologies (such as Map Reduce,  are needed for cloud-scaling.

SaaS can be offered directly from dedicated hardware, but software developer’s and provider’s life would be easier with the support of IaaS clouds, and could be even better with PaaS technologies supporting scalability, deployment and other issues.

Article Reference:

Caceres J., Vaquero L.M., Rodero-Merino L. Polo A., Hierro J.J. “Service Scalability Over the Cloud” , Handbook of Cloud Computing, Editors: Furth B. and Escalante A., Springer, New York (USA), 2010. ISBN: 978-1-4419-6523-3

Among a wealth of features, Cloud computing is about replication, about managing heterogeneous workloads and direct them dynamically to the most appropriate replicas available (and creating new replicas if the current number is not enough, i.e., horizontal scalability).

Indeed, the Cloud has recently been dubbed as “what makes the Cloud something more than an outsourced service with a pretty marketing face” by Owens in ACM Queue. However, when looking back for some inspiration sources, one suddenly realizes that many of the issues he/she is facing have previously been dealt with by many others in several different aspects.

A somewhat old (2004) article by Sivasubramanian popped up this déja vu. The idea of a feedback controller to treat how VMs are replicated that we presented in FGCS a few months ago, is also used by these authors to explain how the control scalability (replication) of Web systems. The questions they pose have 100% validity in current IaaS Cloud scenarios:

1. What is the best metric to scale a set of VMs? we have added service level metrics to this, by the essence remains the same.
2. When and Where do we replicate a Web document? the shift here has  been to where do we have to place a given VM in our datacenter farm and when such replication should be triggered.
3. How do we route these requests to the appropriate replica? This question is kept unaltered for cloud systems.

Thus, metric determination, triggering replication, placement of the new replica and request routing are shared elements between IaaS clouds and web hosting replication systems. Indeed, some fresh research attempts try to solve these problems for VM allocation and physical servers resource optimization.

Once again, this proves that stopping to avoid reinventing the wheel is worth the employed time.

Claudia’s major article has been rated third in the list of top 25 hottest articles in Computer Science made by Springer.

It seems cloud elasticity is gaining more and more attention these days. More coming up soon.

IBM has recently launched its Cloud Service Provider Platform (CSPP) that is “a comprehensive set of hardware, software, and services” that will let CSPs deliver new cloud-based services to their customers.

Managing millions of VMs concurrently is a nice.have, but what happens when it comes to controlling applications (more than just collections of VMs). This is a verily long desired capability that few other systems allowed you to perform. However, there are some important features to help Cloud Service Providers actually manage their services/applications. These guys are not concerned about vCPU usage, or vMEM usage, etc (typical cloud metrics), but they want to scale and control services automatically by setting rules closer to their common mindsets. Is the user supposed to be controlling every VM individually, do they envision the abstraction of the application (as a set of VMs plus their shared context, linked deployment, entwined scaling rules attaining a whole tier, custom actions and metrics for scaling, etc.)?

Also, SLAs and security are key barriers to attract clients to your platform. How are these dealt with in this new product? Too many questions to be solved. I hope I may have the chance to work with this and find out a bit more soon.