Cloud Resource Broker for Scientific Community

• By: Shahzad Nizamani• Supervisor: Peter Dew• Co Supervisor: Karim Djemame • Mo Haji

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Contents

• Defining Cloud Computing

• My research aims and objectives

• Progress to date

• Future work

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Defining Cloud Computing

Scientific Definition

• A large-scale distributed computing paradigm that is driven by economies of scale, in which a pool of abstracted, virtualized, dynamically-scalable, managed computing power, storage, platforms, and services are delivered on demand (Foster)

• Computing Clouds are vast resource pools with on-demand resource allocation and they tend to be priced like utilities [2]

Market Definition

• Cloud computing is about Elasticity (Elasticity is the quality of increasing or decreasing the available resources instantly) [3]

• Cloud Computing is a way of using Internet to allow people to access technology enabled services [3]

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Services offered by Cloud Computing

• Cloud computing offers three kinds of services

Software as a Service (SaaS)

SaaS is a way of using software as the software is installed on a server and a user can use it without installing. (Gmail, YouTube)

Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS)

IaaS is a way of using hardware resources like computer and storage as a service (AmazonEC2, Amazon S3, ElasticHosts)

Platform as a Service (PaaS)

A combination of SaaS and IaaS as a user can develop applications online and deploy them (Microsoft Azure, Google Apps)

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Scientific Community

• Need for large computational resources

• Workflows are often used to describe scientific process they consist of entities

• Entities can be compute intensive with a need of large amount of computational resources

• Need for compute resource has accumulated over the years

Analyze Design Test Deploy

Workflow for software development

Code Debug

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My Research

Aim

• Create a Semantically enhanced Cloud based resource broker which can allocate cloud resources to entities

Objectives

• Analyze use of Semantics for resource matching

• Defining terms

• Measuring QoS provided by vendors

• User oriented brokering

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Cloud ResourceWorkflow

Entity

Resource Broker

QoS

QoS

Recommended Vendor

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Progress to date

• Classification of Cloud vendors

• GridGain vendors claim that they are Cloud Solution providers while the results of the experiment show that their product can funtion without a network connection which is unlikely for a Cloud solution

• A software prototype of a resource broker was created

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Vendor Classification

• Over a 100 companies a involved in Cloud Computing

• Companies are generally categorised as SaaS, PaaS or IaaS providers

• Many factors were analyzed including the

• Developer Platform, API support, Protocol, Pricing, Services User Accounts, Ease of Deployment, Ease of Use, Instant Server Deployment, Operating mechanism, Virtualization Format, Private Cloud, Subscription

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Defining Quality of Service (QoS)

Factors which affect the QoS for Cloud are given below

• Uptime/Downtime

• Privacy

• Loss of data

• Vendor experience

• Size of vendor organization

• Number of customers

• Security (specially data security)

• Trust

There is no agreed definition of these term so defining these terms therefore defining terms related to QoS is also part of research

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Software Experiment

• An experiment was performed to create a software prototype of the resource broker

• Used three vendors (AmazonEC2, Flexiscale, ElasticHosts)

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Features Amazon Flexiscale Elastic Hosts

Computing (1.75GB RAM)

$0.11 per hour (Linux) $0.135 per hour (Windows)

(2 GB RAM)

£0.20 per hour (Linux)

£0.23 per hour (Windows)

(2 GB RAM)

£0.065/hour (Linux)

Storage $0.18 per GB-month £0.30/GB-month £0.06/GB-month

Uploads $0.10/GBFree bandwidth between EC2 and S3

£0.07/GB £0.10/GB committed

£0.20/GB burst above committed

Downloads $0.17/GBFree bandwidth between EC2 and S3

£0.10 < 1TB/month £0.10/GB committed

£0.20/GB burst above committed

Firewalling ------------------------ £0.01 / hour per IP --------------------

Load Balancing ------------------------ £0.02 / hour per IP -----------------------

Extra Features SOAP and ReST and other API support, SQS service

Control Panel, Monitoring & Recovery, API support

-----------------------

Vendor classification

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Vendor Focus

• Every vendors focuses a group of users with a specific level of expertise

• Same services provided by different vendors at different prices

• Level of support makes the difference

• Amazon focuses users with good knowledge of SSH clients

• Flexisclae focuses users with basic knowledge of using computers

• ElasticHosts focuses users with extensive knowledge in Linux

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Prototype of Software

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Scenarios

• A list of scenarios have been created and tested with the software

• Scenarios help in testing the experiment

• A chemical engineer wishes to solve a set of chemical reactions for doing so he will need to install a software on the machines and than execute the equations. He does not have much background of working with SSH clients and is happy to pay more for the ease of use

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Future Work

User

• Identify user needs

• Identify users ability

QoS

• Creating way to measure QoS

• Applying QoS on entity level

• Use of Semantics

• Developing Scenarios to analyze the use

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Conclusion

• Cloud vendors provide different level of QoS

• Cloud vendor state a user is responsible for what he does on the Cloud

• Ways to measure QoS provided by a Cloud vendor have not been created

• QoS statement provided by a vendor can be misleading (Flexiscale claim 99.9% uptime even after 2 days of downtime)

• Services provided by vendors are focused at user with a specific set of skills

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References

• [1] Foster I, “Cloud Computing and Grid Computing 360-Degree Compared” November 2008

• [2] Expo, C.C. Twenty-One Experts Define Cloud Computing. 2008 [cited; Available from: http://weblogic.sys-con.com/node/612375

• [3] 21 Experts on Cloud Computing http://virtualization.sys-con.com/node/612375