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Achieving Federated and Self-Manageable Cloud Infrastructures: Theory and Practice

http://mdslab.unime.it/fsci11/

Editors: Dr. Ivona Brandic, Vienna University of Technology, Austria Dr. Massimo Villari, University of Messina, Italy Francesco Tusa, University of Messina, Italy

Call for Chapters: Proposals Submission Deadline: March 15, 2011 Full Chapters Due: July 15, 2011 Submission Date: November 15, 2011

Introduction

Cloud Computing presents a promising approach for implementing scalable ICT systems for private and public, individual-, community- and business-use. Resources are pooled and offered on-demand with ubiquitous network access to rapidly configurable and elastic IT capabilities. Resources are delivered following three basic delivery models: provisioning of remote applications (SaaS), provisioning of remote platforms to create applications (PaaS), and provisioning of remote infrastructures for processing, storing, and networking (IaaS). The key benefits of providing computing power using Clouds are (a) avoidance of expensive computer systems configured to cope with peak performance; (b) pay-as-you-go solutions for computing cycles requested on-demand; and (c) avoidance of idle computing resources, resulting in novel business models.

Gartner, Inc. has identified Cloud Computing as the most important strategic technology for the year 2010. Looking toward the near future, T. Bittman has hypothesized that it will evolve in three subsequent stages (Gartner Blog Network): • Stage 1 “Monolithic” (now), where cloud services are based on independent proprietary architectures - islands of Cloud services delivered by mega-providers (this is what Amazon, Google, Salesforce and Microsoft look like today); • Stage 2 “Vertical Supply Chain”, where Cloud providers will leverage Cloud services from other providers - the Clouds will be proprietary infrastructure yet, but the ecosystem building will start; • Stage 3 “Horizontal Federation”, smaller, medium, and large cloud providers will federate themselves to gain economies of scale and an enlargement of their capabilities in order to build up services.

Thus, the current development of the Cloud computing markets results in the gap between the mega-providers like Amazon, Google etc. which have monolithic infrastructures provided to the public use and Small/Medium Enterprises (SMEs) Cloud providers which have to federate, in- or outsource their infrastructures, maybe combine on demand offers of different mega-providers and act as Cloud resellers providing guarantees not only on functional but also non functional properties of their services.

The gap between the infrastructural development of Cloud mega providers and Cloud SMEs providers is reflected by the Cloud infrastructure developments in US and Europe. While US Cloud landscape is dominated by the mega scale providers like Amazon and Google, in Europe Cloud providers are generally Telcos developing their private Clouds and SMEs offering their Cloud infrastructures to specific user groups with specific needs (e.g. specific security infrastructures).

Objective of the Book

This book will overview current developments in Cloud computing concepts, architectures, infrastructures and methods, especially focusing on the needs of SMEs.

On one hand, highly scalable infrastructures are required to comply with the varying load, software and hardware failures using Cloud federation scenarios. On the other hand autonomic management infrastructures are required to adapt, manage and utilize Cloud ecosystem in an efficient way. Cloud federation also allows to minimize the interaction among Cloud infrastructures, Cloud user and Cloud providers. Moreover, efficient market mechanisms are necessary where Cloud providers and consumers can advertise and sell their products.

Thus, the contributions in this book should represent a triangle between the cloud federation, resource management and economic models (SLA management, business models) used to enforce the scale economy of the Cloud Computing infrastructures.

Overview

Our proposal mainly addresses the topic of Cloud computing at two levels: the first one introduces the fundamentals of Cloud Computing and its impact on the IT world; the second one, beginning from the previous concepts, provides an analysis of the main issues regarding the Cloud federation, autonomic resource management and efficient market mechanisms, while also supplying an overview of the existing solutions able to solve them.

In order to federate different Clouds, in fact, several topics have to be taken into account: - The middleware that has to be employed: open source solutions, integration with proprietary systems. - Resource management for Cloud computing: discovering and match-making (i.e. to select the most suitable cloud which satisfy certain requirements). - Security and trust issues regarding data confidentiality and user authentication. - Cloud Interoperability and Inter-Cloud resource management: * Virtual resources migration; * Security management among different administrative domains; * SLA resource management among Cloud operators.

In order to give an overview of current developments in the area of the autonomic resource management, chapters will cover following topics: - Cloud related monitoring and SLA management. - Knowledge management in Clouds. - Management of energy efficiency in Clouds. - Virtual resources management.

The last part of the book will cover the novel market mechanisms as well es economic and business models for Clouds, including: - Theoretical developments of the Economic models. - Market mechanisms in Clouds. - Successful use cases of Cloud computing for economies of scale. - Business models and management.

Target Audience

Our publication is aimed at both enterprise business managers and research and academic audiences. Enterprise managers will gain knowledge about basic concepts in Cloud Computing, and become informed about Cloud federation issues and using distributed federated Clouds as an alternative to monolithic mega-providers. IT enterprise business managers will better understand how to migrate their own services on Cloud platforms in order to better optimize costs and resources usage, conceptualize new models of distributed federated Clouds instead on the monolithic one, and earn profit from a set of unused hardware resources building a federated Cloud. Researchers and academics will introduce new issues the Cloud computing as well as the main research topics related to Cloud federation. These frameworks will help researchers develop unique solutions and approaches.

Potential Topics

More specific recommended topics include, but are not limited to the following: - Resources discovery (from the federated Clouds). - Match-making to find the Clouds which best fit the federation requirement. - AAA (Authentication, Authorization and Accounting). - General Security issues: * Logging; * Auditing; * Data confidentiality; * Compliance. - Business management, SLA and billing. - Data storage and smart Virtual Environments allocation. - Resource location and naming. - Middlewares for implementing Clouds (mainly open-source solutions). - Autonomic Cloud management: * Cloud monitoring; * Cloud knowledge management; * Energy efficient Cloud computing; * Creation, Management and Deletion of Federation bindings. - Cloud markets: * Optimized management of human resources (maintenance costs, etc.); * Green computing and energy efficiency in large scale distributed systems; * Challenges but also opportunities for Cloud markets and economies; * Ability to satisfy more clients in a dynamic fashion.

Submission Procedure

Researchers and practitioners are invited to submit on or before March 15, 2011, a 2-3 page chapter proposal clearly explaining the mission and concerns of his or her proposed chapter. Authors of accepted proposals will be notified by March 30, 2011, about the status of their proposals and sent chapter guidelines. Full chapters are expected to be submitted by July 15, 2011. All submitted chapters will be reviewed on a double-blind review basis. Contributors may also be requested to serve as reviewers for this project.

Publisher

This book is scheduled to be published in 2012 by IGI Global (formerly Idea Group Inc.), publisher of the “Information Science Reference” (formerly Idea Group Reference), “Medical Information Science Reference,” “Business Science Reference,” and “Engineering Science Reference” imprints. For additional information regarding the publisher, please visit www.igi-global.com.

Important Dates

March 15, 2011: Proposal Submission Deadline March 30, 2011: Notification of Acceptance July 15, 2011: Full Chapter Submission September 15, 2011: Review Results Returned November 15, 2011: Final Chapter Submission December 15, 2011: Final Deadline

Editorial Advisory Board Members:

Young Woo Lee University of Seoul, South Korea Ignacio M. Llorente Universidad Complutense de Madrid, Spain Philippe Massonet CETIC, Belgium Gabriel Mateescu National Center for Supercomputing Applications, US Omer Rana Cardiff University, UK Benny Rochwerger IBM, Israel

Inquiries and submissions can be forwarded electronically (Word document):

Proposal and full Chapters submission through the FSCI11 easychair web page

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Mario Fanelli, Ph.D. Student DEIS-LIA - Università degli Studi di Bologna Viale Risorgimento, 2 - 40136 Bologna (ITALY) Ph.: (+39) 051 209 3541 Fax: (+39) 051 209 3073. E-mail: mario.fanelli@unibo.it or mario.fanelli@gmail.com Web: http://www-lia.deis.unibo.it/Staff/MarioFanelli/ _________________________________________