Cloud Services Research Articles

A Comprehensive Taxonomy of Modern Public Cloud Services for Infrastructure Selection

The rapid adoption of public cloud services has transformed the digital landscape, offering diverse solutions to meet different business needs. However, this diversity of services also presents a challenge: the need for a structured, comprehensive taxonomy to navigate and understand the offerings. This paper presents a comprehensive taxonomy for public cloud services, aiming to provide clarity and structure in this domain. Leveraging extensive market research, analysis of leading industry reports, and insights from top cloud vendors, we have identified key criteria that form the foundation of our taxonomy. The taxonomy passed the validation process, involving industry experts from Ukraine's largest telco operator, ensuring its practical relevance. The results have proven the taxonomy's effectiveness in classifying a wide range of cloud services, highlighting its potential as a valuable tool for businesses, researchers, and cloud practitioners. This research serves as a foundation for future improvement of complex processes of cloud provider selection.

Integrating Kubernetes Autoscaling for Cost Efficiency in Cloud Services

Kubernetes Autoscaling Mechanism for Integration into Cloud Services to Achieve Cost Efficiency Organizations have turned towards containerized applications and microservices architecture. Optimizing and using resources appropriately as per the expected operational cost becomes the need of the hour. There are several autoscaling mechanisms within Kubernetes, that include Horizontal Pod Autoscaler, Vertical Pod Autoscaler, and Cluster Autoscaler, working towards cost optimization. We study predictive scaling algorithms, multi-dimensional autoscaling strategies, and machine learning-based approaches for resource allocation. Among the new challenges of implementing the solution are the methodologies followed in evaluating the research, which also involves complex advanced optimization techniques: from integrating serverless, towards multicloud autoscaling. Our findings will give an understanding of the status quo of Kubernetes autoscaling towards cost efficiency and recommendations for future research and industrial implementation.

Serverless Computing in the Edge-Cloud Continuum : Challenges, Opportunities, and a Novel Framework

This article explores the integration of serverless computing across the edge-cloud continuum, addressing the growing demand for low-latency, data-intensive applications in the era of the Internet of Things (IoT). We present EdgeServe, a novel framework that extends the serverless paradigm to encompass edge devices and cloud resources, overcoming the limitations of traditional cloud-centric approaches. Through comprehensive simulations and real-world case studies, including a smart city traffic management system, an industrial IoT predictive maintenance application, and a mobile augmented reality gaming platform, we evaluate the performance, scalability, and cost-effectiveness of our proposed framework. Our results demonstrate significant improvements in application response times, with latency reductions of up to 82% in time-critical functions, and an average cost reduction of 43% compared to cloud-only serverless deployments. We also observe a 28% decrease in overall energy consumption in certain scenarios. The article addresses key challenges in resource management, data consistency, adaptive function placement, and security in distributed environments. Our findings have important implications for application architects and cloud service providers, paving the way for a new generation of edge-native serverless platforms. This research contributes to the growing body of knowledge on distributed systems and offers insights into the future evolution of serverless computing in heterogeneous computing environments.

Multi‐objective based container placement strategy in CaaS

AbstractIn contrast to a conventional virtual machine (VM), a container is a lightweight virtualization technology. Containers are becoming a prominent technology for cloud services because of their portable, scalable, and flexible deployments, especially in the Internet of Things (IoT), smart devices, and fog and edge computing. It is a type of operating system‐level virtualization in which the kernel allows multiple isolated containers to run independently. Container placement (CP) is a nontrivial problem in Container‐as‐a‐Service (CaaS). CP is mapping to a container over virtual machines (VMs) to execute an application. Designing an efficient CP strategy is complex due to several intertwined challenges. These challenges arise from a diverse spectrum of computing resources, like on‐demand and unpredictable fluctuations of IT resources by multiple tenants. In this article, we propose a modified sum‐based container placement algorithm called a multi‐objective optimization‐based container placement algorithm (MSBCPA). In the proposed algorithm, we have considered two metrics: makespan and monetary costs for optimizing available IT resources. We have conducted comprehensive simulation experiments to validate the effectiveness of the proposed algorithm over the CloudSim 4.0 simulator. The proposed optimization algorithm (MSBCPA) aims to minimize the makespan and the execution monetary costs simultaneously. In the simulation, we found that the execution cost and energy consumption cost reduce by 20% to 30% and achieve the best possible cost‐makespan trade‐offs compared to competing algorithms.

Prototype for Multi-UAV Monitoring–Control System Using WebRTC

Most unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) ground control station (GCS) solutions today are either web-based or native applications, primarily designed to support a single UAV. In this paper, our research aims to provide an open, universal framework intended for rapid prototyping, addressing these objectives by developing a Web Real-Time Communication (WebRTC)-based multi-UAV monitoring and control system for applications such as automated power line inspection (APOLI). The APOLI project focuses on identifying damage and faults in power line insulators through real-time image processing, video streaming, and flight data monitoring. The implementation is divided into three main parts. First, we configure UAVs for hardware-accelerated streaming using the GStreamer framework on the NVIDIA Jetson Nano companion board. Second, we develop the server-side application to receive hardware-encoded video feeds from the UAVs by utilizing a WebRTC media server. Lastly, we develop a web application that facilitates communication between clients and the server, allowing users with different authorization levels to access video feeds and control the UAVs. The system supports three user types: pilot/admin, inspector, and customer. Our research aims to leverage the WebRTC media server framework to develop a web-based GCS solution capable of managing multiple UAVs with low latency. The proposed solution enables real-time video streaming and flight data collection from multiple UAVs to a server, which is displayed in a web application interface hosted on the GCS. This approach ensures efficient inspection for applications like APOLI while prioritizing UAV safety during critical scenarios. Another advantage of the solution is its integration compatibility with platforms such as cloud services and native applications, as well as the modularity of the plugin-based architecture offered by the Janus WebRTC server for future development.

Mastering Salesforce Payments: Tackling Integration, Security, and Scalability

Salesforce Payments, when integrated with Sales Cloud, Service Cloud or Revenue Cloud, offers a comprehensive solution for managing transactions, including quoting, invoicing, and payment processing. Key best practices include thorough training for service agents, ongoing support, creating payment dashboards, and leveraging advanced analytics for insights. Challenges include integration complexity, security compliance, customization limitations, scalability, and managing failed payments. By following best practices and addressing these challenges, organizations can optimize their payment processing system within Salesforce for improved efficiency and customer satisfaction. Keywords—Payments, Payment Gateway, Billing, Subscription, Commerce, B2B, B2C, Payment Processors.

Optimizing Cloud Computing Performance by Integrating the Novel PSBR Service Broker Policy and Load Balancing Algorithms

As cloud computing advances, organizations' IT infrastructure and application deployment processes are moving to the cloud because cloud computing provides everything as a service over the Internet. The performance of a cloud-based application is based on proper datacenter selection and workload distribution within the selected datacenter. Service broker policies are used for suitable datacenter selection, and load balancing algorithms(LBA) are applied to distribute workloads. This paper is to evaluate the effect of a proposed service broker policy (PSBR) on the performance of cloud-based applications with LBA. To achieve the objective, the behavior of the TikTok application was modeled using the worldwide users’ statistics on the cloud simulation framework, namely CloudAnalyst. As a result, the average response time and data center processing time are measured. Next, the PSBR provides better results than the existing service proximity-based policy. This paper supports cloud service providers' benefits, from coordination between data center configuration, data center selection, and workload distribution to cloud users' identification of the appropriate procedures for their organization or application. PSBR with Active Monitoring had the best average response time of 75.1 ms, while SPR consistently exhibited higher average times across all algorithms, with the highest being 84.5 ms for Round Robin. Under the PSBR policy, Throttled had the lowest average processing time (4.67), while Round Robin had the highest (5.72). Similarly, under the SPR policy, Throttled maintained its efficiency with the lowest average (4.8), while Round Robin showed the highest (5.79).

An efficient hierarchical attribute-based encryption scheme with cross-domain data sharing

With the rapid advancement of data sharing technology, an increasing amount of data is being stored on cloud servers. To enable fine-grained access control over the data stored on cloud servers, the Ciphertext-Policy Attribute-Based Encryption (CP-ABE) technology has been widely adopted. Recognizing that shared data and files often possess a hierarchical structure, hierarchical CP-ABE technology has been proposed recently. However, most existing schemes are restricted to single-domain data access, which limits their flexibility and universal applicability in practical applications. To address this limitation, an access control scheme based on hierarchical CP-ABE, named CDS-CP-ABE, is proposed to facilitate secure and efficient cross-domain data sharing. The scheme is capable of not only realizing fine-grained hierarchical access control within a single domain but also enabling cross-domain data sharing. Security analysis confirms that our scheme effectively resists chosen-plaintext attack. Furthermore, empirical results indicate that the time consumption associated with our scheme is lower compared to other existing schemes.

Privacy-preserving and verifiable convolution neural network inference and training in cloud computing

With the rapid development of cloud computing, outsourcing massive data and complex deep learning model to cloud servers (CSs) has become a popular trend, which also brings some security problems. One is that the model stored in the CSs may be corrupted, leading to incorrect inference and training results. The other is that the privacy of outsourced data and model may be compromised. However, existing privacy-preserving and verifiable inference schemes suffer from low detection probability, high communication overhead and substantial computational time. To solve the above problems, we propose a privacy-preserving and verifiable scheme for convolutional neural network inference and training in cloud computing. In our scheme, the model owner generates the authenticators for model parameters before uploading the model to CSs. In the phase of model integrity verification, model owner and user can utilize these authenticators to check model integrity with high detection probability. Furthermore, we design a set of privacy-preserving protocols based on replicated secret sharing for both the inference and training phases, significantly reducing communication overhead and computational time. Through security analysis, we demonstrate that our scheme is secure. Experimental evaluations show that the proposed scheme outperforms existing schemes in privacy-preserving inference and model integrity verification.

Check-QZP: A Lightweight Checkpoint Mechanism for Deep Learning Frameworks

In deep learning (DL) frameworks, a checkpoint operation is widely used to store intermediate variable values (e.g., weights, biases, and gradients) on storage media. This operation helps to reduce the recovery time of running a machine learning (ML) model after sudden power failures or random crashes. However, the checkpoint operation can stall the overall training step of the running model and waste expensive hardware resources by leaving the GPU in idle sleep during the checkpoint operation. In addition, the completion time of the checkpoint operation is unpredictable in cloud server environments (e.g., AWS and Azure) because excessive I/O operations issued by other running applications interfere with the checkpoint operations in the storage stacks. To efficiently address the above two problems, we carefully designed Check-QZP, which reduces the amount of data required for checkpoint operations and parallelizes executions on the CPU and GPU by understanding the internal behaviors of the training step. For the evaluation, we implemented Check-QZP and compared it with the traditional approach in real-world multi-tenant scenarios. In the evaluation, Check-QZP outperformed the baseline in all cases in terms of the overall checkpoint time and the amount of data generated by the checkpoint operations, reducing them by up to 87.5% and 99.8%, respectively. In addition, Check-QZP achieved superior training speeds compared to the baseline.

The Application of Deep Learning in Sports Competition Data Prediction

In order to predict sports competition data, the author needs to implement the structure and related processes of the relevant competition victory and defeat prediction system, and specifically introduce and plan the implementation of each functional module. The data collection and storage module adopts Alibaba Cloud servers and combines Python to remotely and automatically collect data on a scheduled basis, according to the actual situation of game wins and losses, data cleaning and filtering are carried out, and multiple encoding forms are used to vectorize the data in order to find the best model. The data is divided according to the standard training and testing sets, and multiple classifiers are used for model training and saved locally for direct use next time; Test the above model using the training set; Compare the advantages and disadvantages of each vectorized encoding and classifier based on the final performance evaluation module. Based on the relevant experimental results, a detailed analysis was conducted to compare the advantages and disadvantages of each model, proving that introducing word vectors (word embeddings) into the competition data analysis system is worthwhile. We have obtained an excellent performance prediction model with a highest accuracy P of 0.825, a recall R of 0.729, and a corresponding F1 value of 0.774. For a prediction model that only knows the initial lineup allocation as a prerequisite, this already has sufficient practical guidance significance.

Secure collaborative EHR Sharing using multi-authority attribute-based proxy re-encryption in Web 3.0

Web 3.0 represents a transformative shift toward a decentralized, intelligent, and user-centric Internet. Existing electronic health record (EHR) sharing systems depend on centralized cloud servers for storage and management, with hospitals serving as primary custodians. This centralization often results in patients losing control and visibility over their EHR data, including who accesses it and how it is utilized, which contradicts the decentralized principles of Web 3.0. In this context, we propose a multi-authority attribute-based proxy re-encryption scheme that facilitates collaborative EHR sharing in Web 3.0. Our design allows the updating of ciphertext policies, thereby eliminating the need for frequent re-encryption of plaintext data amid varying cross-domain access policies. Furthermore, our scheme utilizes blockchain technology to create a decentralized and transparent environment that enables traceable cross-domain EHR sharing records. Additionally, we integrate hybrid encryption with decentralized data hosting platforms, significantly reducing the on-chain storage burden. The use of smart contracts automates the cross-domain EHR sharing and guarantees a fair distribution of benefits among all participants. Security analysis confirms that our scheme is secure against chosen plaintext attacks and resistant to collusion. Performance analysis and simulation experiments validate the efficiency and robustness of our scheme.

Growth-adaptive distillation compressed fusion model for network traffic identification based on IoT cloud-edge collaboration

The development of the Internet of Things (IoT) has led to the rapid growth of the types and number of connected devices and has generated large amounts of complex and diverse traffic data. Traffic identification on edge servers solves the real-time and privacy requirements of IoT management and has attracted much attention, but still faces several problems: (1) traditional machine learning (ML) models rely on artificially constructed features, and the existing deep learning (DL) traffic identification models have reached their performance limit; and (2) insufficient computing resources of edge servers limit the possible improvement in the performance of deep learning models by increasing the number of parameters and structural complexity. To address these issues, we propose a lightweight fusion model. First, the Network-in-Network (NiN) model and Random Forest (RF) model are used on the cloud server to construct a traffic identification fusion model. The excellent representation extraction capability of the NiN compensates for the RF’s dependence on manual feature extraction, and its modular structure is suitable for the subsequent model compression operations. Then, the NiN was distilled. We propose Growth-Adaptive Distillation to lightweight the NiN model, which can reduce the operation of manually adjusting the structure of the student model and ensure the efficiency and low power consumption of the fusion model deployment. In addition, both the RF in the cloud and the distilled NiN are deployed on the edge server. Comparisons with multiple algorithms on two network traffic datasets show that the proposed model achieves state-of-the-art performance while ensuring the use of minimal computational resources.

An IoT Based Real-Time Environmental Monitoring System for Developing Areas

Rapid urbanization and industrialization have raised concerns about environmental quality and sustainability in recent years. The Internet of Things (IoT) has played an important role in monitoring physical phenomena by generating data that can be sent and preserved in the cloud. This work explores an IoT-based environmental monitoring system's potential, using an Arduino-based device for real-time tracking of environmental parameters including sound levels, humidity, dust concentration, total volatile organic compounds (TVOC), carbon dioxide (CO2), and carbon monoxide (CO). Real-time data are collected from various semi-residential and marketplace locations named in Pach raster More, Tomaltola, DowamoyiMore, Fojdarimore, and station road in Jamalpur district of Mymensingh Division, Bangladesh on non-holiday days, providing a representative snapshot of typical environmental conditions. The collected data is stored in a cloud server named firebase database. The implemented monitoring system offers several key features including accuracy and reliability, real-time monitoring data analytics alerts and notifications historical data as well as it can lead to various benefits and impacts of Improved Air and Water Quality Healthier Urban Environment (IAWUE) to enable local authorities and individuals to make educated decisions for a healthier and more sustainable urban environment. Graphical representations of the data revealed distinct patterns and trends, offering valuable insights into air quality variations across different areas. Interestingly, the results showed sound levels slightly below the standard range, indicating a relative control of noise pollution in the sampled areas. The findings of the work will serve as a vital resource for further research and guide policy-making for environmental improvement and sustainable practices in urban settings.

Optimization of IoT perceived content caching in F-RANs: Minimum retrieval delay and resource extension with performance sensitivity

In the Internet of Things (IoT) perceived applications of monitoring the states of the environment, a feasible technology is to use fog radio access networks (F-RANs) to alleviate the problems of long response time and cloud server bottlenecks in cloud computing. In response to the above problems, this work investigates the problem of minimizing the retrieval delay of IoT contents in F-RANs under the constraints of system resources. The problem is formulated as an integer linear programming (ILP) model. Then, a polynomial-time method with linear programming (LP) relaxation and rounding is proposed to approximate the optimal solution of the problem. Through proof, the method can obtain a feasible solution with a bounded approximation ratio in polynomial time. The conducted simulations validate that the obtained feasible solution is very close to the optimal one. On the other hand, when the system resources are not enough to meet the continuous growth of content retrieval and need to be expanded, this work further establishes an association relation between cached contents and system resources. Based on the above relation, the second method of expanding system resources with performance sensitivity is proposed to provide the service provider with an effective and economical expansion of system resources. It utilizes a predefined system parameter in balancing the trade-off between the approximation ratio to the optimal solution of the problem and the extended system resources. The solution obtained by the second method is also proved to have a bounded approximation ratio.

Do You “Relay” Want to Give Me Away? – Forensic Cues of Smart Relays and Their IoT Companion Apps

As IoT devices become more prevalent in everyday environments, their relevance to digital investigations increases. The product class of “smart relays”, which are connected to the low-voltage grid and usually installed in sockets behind walls, has not yet received much attention in the context of smart home forensics. To close a category-specific gap in the device forensics literature, we conducted a multi-device analysis of 16 smart relays from 9 manufacturers, which support six different companion apps in total. Our examination shows that forensic artifacts can be found locally on the smart relays and in the companion app data, as well as remotely on cloud servers of the vendors. Based on our findings, we developed a Python framework to extract forensic artifacts automatically from obtained firmware dumps, from companion app data, and from captured network traffic.

Practical and Robust Federated Learning With Highly Scalable Regression Training.

Privacy-preserving federated learning, as one of the privacy-preserving computation techniques, is a promising distributed and privacy-preserving machine learning (ML) approach for Internet of Medical Things (IoMT), due to its ability to train a regression model without collecting raw data of data owners (DOs). However, traditional interactive federated regression training (IFRT) schemes rely on multiple rounds of communication to train a global model and are still under various privacy and security threats. To overcome these problems, several noninteractive federated regression training (NFRT) schemes have been proposed and applied in a variety of scenarios. However, there are still several challenges: 1) how to protect the privacy of DOs' local dataset; 2) how to realize highly scalable regression training without linear dependence on sample dimension; 3) how to tolerate DOs' dropout; and 4) how to enable DOs to verify the correctness of aggregated results returned from the cloud service provider (CSP). In this article, we propose two practical noninteractive federated learning schemes with privacy-preserving for IoMT, named homomorphic encryption based NFRT (HE-NFRT) and double-masking protocol based NFRT (Mask-NFRT), respectively, which are based on a comprehensive consideration of NFRT, privacy concerns, high-efficiency, robustness, and verification mechanism. The security analyses display that our proposed schemes are able to protect the privacy of DOs' local training data, resist collusion attack, and support strong verification to each DO. The performance evaluation results demonstrate that our proposed HE-NFRT scheme is desirable for a high-dimensional and high-security IoMT application while Mask-NFRT scheme is desirable for a high-dimensional and large-scale IoMT application.

Cloud-based solution for urbanization monitoring using satellite images

Motivated by the large amount of available satellite data and increasing interest in the study of urbanization, this paper presents a way for better supervision of urbanization, as more and more people are looking to increase their quality of life by migrating to urban areas. This project is particularly useful for environmental researchers or citizens who are looking to make informed decisions. This project utilizes Sentinel Hub, a multi-spectral satellite imagery cloud service, to access Sentinel 2 data to detect changes in Romania’s urban environment automatically. Sentinel Hub’s spectral bands, which describe the reflectance properties of a surface, are used to compute spectral indices that highlight patterns in satellite images. The paper analyzes two urban indices that successfully map build-up regions and a vegetation index that assesses the degree of vegetation in an urbanized area. It employs different methods to enhance each index and evaluates its performance in a town that has seen rapid urban expansion.

An Internet of Things Task Scheduling Framework Based on Agile Virtual Network on Demand Service Model

In order to improve the efficiency of cloud computing resource utilization and avoid the problem of computing resource allocation and scheduling lagging behind load changes, the author proposes a cloud computing resource on-demand allocation and elastic scheduling method based on network load prediction. Firstly, the author takes the network load data of Wikimedia as the research object and proposes an adaptive two-stage multi network model load prediction method based on LSTM, i.e. ATSMNN-LSTM load prediction method). This method can classify the network load data into climbing and descending types based on the trend and characteristics of the input network load data, And adaptively schedule the input network load data to the LSTM load prediction model that matches its type for prediction based on the classification results. The author proposes a maximum cloud service revenue computing resource quantity search algorithm based on network load prediction (i.e. MaxCSPRNWP algorithm), which aims to improve cloud service revenue as the optimization objective. Under the premise of ensuring task service quality and system stability, the algorithm allocates cloud computing resources on demand and flexibly schedules them in advance based on the predicted network load results. The experimental results show that the ATSMNNLSTM load prediction method proposed by the author can obtain more accurate network load prediction results compared to other load prediction methods, and the MaxCSPR-NWP algorithm, which is based on network load prediction and is capable of effectively converting the network load prediction results into the required number of cloud servers, is the maximum cloud service revenue computing resource quantity search algorithm proposed by the author, not only does it achieve the early allocation and scheduling of cloud computing resources, thereby avoiding the impact of lagging behind in computing resource allocation and scheduling due to load changes on the quality of cloud computing task services and resource utilization efficiency, at the same time, it has also achieved on-demand allocation and flexible scheduling of cloud computing resources with the goal of improving cloud service revenue.

Rancang Bangun Website Layanan Muggle Cloud Terintegrasi dengan WHMCS & Tidio LiveChat

This study aims to design and develop the Muggle Cloud service website integrated with WHMCS (Web Host Manager Complete Solution) and Tidio LiveChat. The background of this research is the need for a hosting platform that can manage hosting services, payments, and customer support effectively and efficiently. Many hosting companies currently face difficulties in integrating account management systems, payment processes, and customer support, resulting in suboptimal services for users. The purpose of this research is to develop an integrated system that can solve these problems by providing a website that facilitates hosting service management and supports real-time interaction between customers and technical support. The method used in this research is the Waterfall software development model, which includes the stages of requirement analysis, system design, implementation, testing, and maintenance. Data were collected through literature studies, interviews with related parties, and analysis of existing systems. The results of the research show that the integration between WHMCS and Tidio LiveChat on the Muggle Cloud platform successfully provides an effective solution for managing hosting services and customer support. The implementation of this system not only simplifies administrative and payment processes but also increases responsiveness to customer needs and inquiries through live chat features. The conclusion of this research is that the integrated system can improve operational efficiency and customer satisfaction in hosting service companies and make an important contribution to the development of integrated hosting service management technology.