Access Control in Federated Clouds

Resource sharing problem is one of the most important aspects of Cloud architectures whose primary goal is to fully enable the concept of accessing computing resources on-demand. Access control and resource federation are hot research topics and a lot of open issues should be addressed on functionalities, technological interoperability, quality of services and security of the federated infrastructures. This chapter aims at offering a view on the problems of access control on federated Clouds; since they strongly depend on chosen architectures and platforms, the chapter will discuss some solutions applied on a real case study: the PerfCloud framework, which is based on the integration of Grid and Cloud platforms. The proposed architecture is based on the adoption of an interoperability system to cope with identity federation and access control, it is strictly related to the adopted framework nevertheless it helps the reader to have an idea of the involved open issues and available solutions in commercial or experimental clouds.

Deploying and Running Enterprise Grade Applications in a Federated Cloud

The notion of cloud computing is a paradigm shift from local machines and networks to virtualization technologies with services as a technical and business concept. This shift introduces major challenges when using cloud for deploying and running enterprise applications in the current Enterprise ecosystems. For companies, picking and choosing the right cloud to meet requirements is hard, and no solution is likely to provide the end-to-end specific IT services delivery and an end-to-end IT solution. Conversely cloud federation assists in providing flexibility to the customer and enables them to lower their TCO by shifting from one cloud to another while mitigating risks associated with a single cloud approach. In order to create competitive differentiation, small businesses require multiple software systems to both meet minimal data management and creative expectations. At the other end of the enterprise ecosystem spectrum, large companies rely on thousands of services in order to meet the needs of everything from simple departmental database applications to core Enterprise Resource planning and Customer Relationship Management systems on which the enterprise itself is managed. As an optimal adoption decision cannot be established for all individual cases, the authors propose to analyze three different use cases for deployment of enterprise applications such as SAP, on the cloud in order to provide some valuable pointers to navigate the emerging cloud ecosystem: rapid provisioning, elasticity and live migration of enterprise applications.

Monitoring Services in a Federated Cloud

This chapter presents the need, the requirements, and the design for a monitoring system that is suitable for supporting the operations and management of a Federated Cloud environment. The chapter discusses these issues within the context of the RESERVOIR Service Cloud computing project. It first presents the RESERVOIR architecture itself, then introduces the issues of service monitoring in a federated environment, together with the specific solutions that have been devised for RESERVOIR. It ends with a review of the authors’ experience in this area by showing a use-case application executing on RESERVOIR, which is responsible for the computational prediction of organic crystal structures.

Security Issues in Cloud Federations

The cloud paradigm, based on the idea of delegating to the network any kind of computational resources, is showing a considerable success. The estimated trend is that the number of different cloud-based solutions, approaches, and service providers (CSP) will continue growing. Despite the big number of different cloud solutions that currently exist, most of them are “walled gardens” unable to interoperate. On the other side, a large effort is taking place in the cloud community to develop and identify open solutions and standards. In such a context the concept of cloud federation, an architecture that combines the functionalities of different CSP, is a hot topic. This chapter presents an overview of the cloud federation topic, with special focus on its most important security challenges. Furthermore, it proposes a taxonomy of possible approaches to federation. Then it proposes a comparison of security problems in cloud and grid environment, and a detailed analysis of two relevant security problems, identity management and Cyber Attacks analysis, trying to outline how they can be applied in a federated context.

Cloud Monitoring

The management of the entire service landscape comprising a Cloud environment is a complex and challenging venture. There, one task of utmost importance, is the generation and processing of information about the state, health, and performance of the various services and IT components, something which is generally referred to as monitoring. Such information is the foundation for proper assessment and management of the whole Cloud. This chapter pursues two objectives: first, to provide an overview of monitoring in Cloud environments and, second, to propose a solution for interoperable and vendor-independent Cloud monitoring. Along the way, the authors motivate the necessity of monitoring at the different levels of Cloud infrastructures, introduce selected state-of-the-art, and extract requirements for Cloud monitoring. Based on these requirements, the following sections depict a Cloud monitoring solution and describe current developments towards interoperable, open, and extensible Cloud monitoring frameworks.

The Cloud@Home Volunteer and Interoperable Cloud through the Future Internet

Cloud computing is the new consolidated trend in ICT, often considered as the panacea to all the problems of existing large-scale distributed paradigms such as Grid and hierarchical clustering. The Cloud breakthrough is the service oriented perspective of providing everything “as a service”. Different from the others large-scale distributed paradigms, it was born from commercial contexts, with the aim of selling the temporarily unexploited computing resources of huge datacenters in order to reduce the costs. Since this business model is really attractive and convenient for both providers and consumers, the Cloud paradigm is quickly growing and widely spreading, even in non commercial context. In fact, several activities on the Cloud, such as Nimbus, Eucalyptus, OpenNEbula, and Reservoir, etc., have been undertaken, aiming at specifying open Cloud infrastructure middleware.

Interoperable Resource Management for Establishing Federated Clouds

Cloud Computing builds on the latest achievements of diverse research areas, such as Grid Computing, Service-oriented computing, business process modeling and virtualization. As this new computing paradigm was mostly lead by companies, several proprietary systems arose. Recently, alongside these commercial systems, several smaller-scale privately owned systems are maintained and developed. This chapter focuses on issues faced by users with interests in Multi-Cloud use and by Cloud providers with highly dynamic workloads. The authors propose a Federated Cloud Management architecture that provides unified access to a federated Cloud that aggregates multiple heterogeneous IaaS Cloud providers in a transparent manner. The architecture incorporates the concepts of meta-brokering, Cloud brokering, and on-demand service deployment. The meta-brokering component provides transparent service execution for the users by allowing the interconnection of various Cloud brokering solutions. Cloud-Brokers manage the number and the location of the Virtual Machines performing the user requests. In order to decrease Virtual Machine instantiation time and increase dynamism in the system, the service deployment component optimizes service delivery by encapsulating services as virtual appliances allowing their decomposition and replication among IaaS Cloud infrastructures. The architecture achieves service provider level transparency through automatic virtual appliance replication and Virtual Machine management of Cloud-Brokers.

Achieving Flexible SLA and Resource Management in Clouds

One of the key factors driving Cloud computing is flexible and on-demand resource provisioning in a pay-as-you-go manner. This resource provisioning is based on Service Level Agreements (SLAs) negotiated and signed between customers and providers. Efficient management of SLAs and Cloud resources to reduce cost, achieve high utilization, and generate profit is challenging due to the large-scale nature of Cloud environments and complex resource provisioning processes. In order to advance the adoption of this technology, it is necessary to identify and address the issues preventing proper resource and SLA management. The authors purport that monitoring is the first step towards successful management strategies. Thus, this chapter identifies the SLA management and monitoring challenges in Clouds and federated Cloud environments, and proposes a novel resource monitoring architecture as a basis for resource management in Clouds. It presents the design and implementation of this architecture and presents the evaluation of the architecture using heterogeneous application workloads.

CLEVER

This chapter describes both the design and architecture of the CLEVER cloud middleware, pointing out the possibilities it offers towards enlarging the concept of federation in more directions. CLEVER is able to accomplish such an enlargement enabling the interaction among whatever type of electronic device connected to Internet, thus offering the opportunity of implementing the Internet of Things. Together with this type of perspective, CLEVER aims to “aggregate” heterogeneous computing infrastructure by putting together Cloud and Grid, as an example. The chapter starts with a description of the cloud projects related to CLEVER, followed by a discussion on the middleware components that mainly focuses on the innovative features they have, in particular the communication mechanisms adopted. The second part of the chapter presents a real use case that exploits the CLEVER features that allow easy creation of federated clouds’ infrastructures that can be also based on integration with existing Grids; it is demonstrated thanks to the “oneshot” CLEVER deploying mechanism. It is possible to scale dynamically the cloud resources by taking advantage of the existing Grid infrastructures, and minimizing the changes needed at the involved management middleware.

Monitoring in Federated and Self-Manageable Clouds

The emergence of Service Clouds and the Future Internet has lead to a lot of research taking place in the area of Cloud frameworks and solutions. The complexity of these systems has proven to be a challenge for the design of a successful platform that will be capable of meeting all possible needs and require the minimum time and effort put to its management. Current trends in the field move away from models of human managed networks and towards the self-manageable, cooperating Clouds. This goal is synonymous to building software that is able to make decisions required to reconfigure itself in a way that it resists failures and, at the same time, makes optimal use of the resources available to it. The heart of each decision making mechanism is always the data that is fed to it, which assigns a very central role to Monitoring mechanisms in federated and self-manageable Clouds.