Spatial modelling of cloud

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A cloud-based farm management system:architecture and implementation

Recent technological advances have paved the way for developing and offering advanced services for the stakeholders in the agricultural sector. A paradigm shift is underway from proprietary and monolithic tools to Internet-based, cloud hosted, open systems that will enable more effective collaboration between stakeholders. This new paradigm includes the technological support of application developers to create specialized services that will seamlessly interoperate, thus creating a sophisticated and customisable working environment for the end users. We present the implementation of an open architecture that instantiates such an approach, based on a set of domain independent software tools called "generic enablers" that have been developed in the context of the FI-WARE project. The implementation is used to validate a number of innovative concepts for the agricultural sector such as the notion of a services' market place and the system's adaptation to network failures. During the design and implementation phase, the system has been evaluated by end users, offering us valuable feedback. The results of the evaluation process validate the acceptance of such a system and the need of farmers to have access to sophisticated services at affordable prices. A summary of this evaluation process is also presented in this paper. © 2013 Elsevier B.V.

A utility model for volunteered service composition

Volunteered Service Composition (VSC) refers to the process of composing volunteered services and resources. These services are typically published to a pool of voluntary resources. The composition aims at satisfying some objectives (e.g. Utilizing storage and eliminating waste, sharing space and optimizing for energy, reducing computational cost etc.). In cases when a single volunteered service does not satisfy a request, VSC will be required. In this paper, we contribute to three approaches for composing volunteered services: these are exhaustive, naïve and utility-based search approach to VSC. The proposed new utility-based approach, for instance, is based on measuring the utility that each volunteered service can provide to each request and systematically selects the one with the highest utility. We found that the utility-based approach tend to be more effective and efficient when selecting services, while minimizing resource waste when compared to the other two approaches.

Specification and quantitative analysis of probabilistic cloud deployment patterns

Cloud computing is a new technological paradigm offering computing infrastructure, software and platforms as a pay-as-you-go, subscription-based service. Many potential customers of cloud services require essential cost assessments to be undertaken before transitioning to the cloud. Current assessment techniques are imprecise as they rely on simplified specifications of resource requirements that fail to account for probabilistic variations in usage. In this paper, we address these problems and propose a new probabilistic pattern modelling (PPM) approach to cloud costing and resource usage verification. Our approach is based on a concise expression of probabilistic resource usage patterns translated to Markov decision processes (MDPs). Key costing and usage queries are identified and expressed in a probabilistic variant of temporal logic and calculated to a high degree of precision using quantitative verification techniques. The PPM cost assessment approach has been implemented as a Java library and validated with a case study and scalability experiments. © 2012 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg.

CloudMPL:a domain specific language for describing management policies for an autonomic cloud infrastructure

To benefit from the advantages that Cloud Computing brings to the IT industry, management policies must be implemented as a part of the operation of the Cloud. Among others, for example, the specification of policies can be used for the management of energy to reduce the cost of running the IT system or also for security policies while handling privacy issues of users. As cloud platforms are large, manual enforcement of policies is not scalable. Hence, autonomic approaches for management policies have recently received a considerable attention. These approaches allow specification of rules that are executed via rule-engines. The process of rules creation starts by the interpretation of the policies drafted by high-rank managers. Then, technical IT staff translate such policies to operational activities to implement them. Such process can start from a textual declarative description and after numerous steps terminates in a set of rules to be executed on a rule engine. To simplify the steps and to bridge the considerable gap between the declarative policies and executable rules, we propose a domain-specific language called CloudMPL. We also design a method of automated transformation of the rules captured in CloudMPL to the popular rule-engine Drools. As the policies are changed over time, code generation will reduce the time required for the implementation of the policies. In addition, using a declarative language for writing the specifications is expected to make the authoring of rules easier. We demonstrate the use of the CloudMPL language into a running example extracted from a management energy consumption case study.