Cloud Management Research Articles

Railway Cloud: Management and Orchestration Functionality Designed as Microservices

The cloudification and virtualisation of railway functions have the potential to improve railway operation efficiency, reliability, safety, and security, as well as to enhance passenger experience by offering innovative services. This paper considers issues related to the management and orchestration of railway clouds that host cloudified railway functions. A microservices-based approach to the design of railway cloud management and orchestration functionality is proposed. The basic railway cloud concepts were defined, and functionality related to the basic orchestration of the railway cloud and deployments is analysed in order to derive the requirements of platform resources and workload management. This functionality is further designed in the form of microservices, meaning that they could possibly be used in orchestration applications to enable improvements in scalability, fault isolation, and data security. The design of microservices follows the principles of the Representational State of Transfer (REST) application programming interface (API) as a set of interlinked resources. Resources related to railway cloud orchestration are identified with their associated data, relationships to other resources, and applicable methods. The resources’ methods are used in railway applications to implement the required orchestration functionality and to maintain the state of railway cloud orchestration processes. To verify the synthesised microservices, the common orchestration application logic and microservices’ logic were modelled, and it was proved that the orchestration processes, which run concurrently, expose equivalent behaviour. The proposed approach was validated using a simulation, aiming to evaluate injected latency as a key performance indicator for the reliability and safety of railway operations. Additionally, some safety and security issues related to railway cloud management and orchestration are considered.

The BMS Tool Monitoring Vertiv UPS and Vision Lithium-Ion Battery System

In my previous work published in an acknowledged publication, titled "Factory test of a TP-100 Lithium Ion Vision Battery System for possible Implementation in Soweto, Johannesburg, South Africa," According to the findings from the study report, the TP-100 Vision Lithium-Ion battery system was found to be suitable for implementing a wind turbine system in Soweto. Furthermore, the study's findings indicated that Lithium-Ion batteries were the optimal choice for storing energy in wind turbines. These batteries provided significant total cost of ownership (TCO) reductions over a 10-year period, without the inconvenience and expenses associated with replacing lead-acid batteries. This research paper aims to validate the precision of parameters obtained from the integration of a 160 kVA Vetiv Three Phase UPS to a TP-100 Vision Lithium Ion Battery system in contrast to those obtained from the Battery Monitoring System (BMS) while using Tool BMS Version 1.3 Software. The results validation was evident as the parameters acquired from the UPS and Battery system were found to be accurate when compared to those observed through the BMS tool. Finally, utilizing the Smart Cloud Management System (SCMS), validity was shown by the ability to remotely monitor the operation of both the UPS and the Li-ion Battery system.

FaaS for IoT: Evolving Serverless towards Deviceless in I/Oclouds

The burgeoning paradigms of Fog and Edge computing propose delegating Cloud-related tasks to the network’s periphery, thus placing computational resources closer to data producers. This shift promises to boost the performance of IoT-based services, providing swift response times while conserving bandwidth. Despite their potential, the current Edge/Fog computing platforms must provide the required flexibility for dynamic service orchestration within a data-oriented context. Addressing this gap, the Function-as-a-Service (FaaS) model emerges as an exceptional strategy for Edge/Fog deployments. Its ability to manage an ever-expanding ecosystem of devices with remarkable flexibility and efficiency holds considerable promise. This paper articulates a novel approach to enhancing the adaptability of IoT Edge/Fog deployments. We propose an innovative extension to OpenStack, an open-source Cloud management system, which pushes its functionality towards the network Edge. Our approach empowers OpenStack to facilitate FaaS services within a distributed IoT infrastructure, thus infusing unprecedented adaptability and efficiency into the Edge/Fog computing paradigms.

Hybrid trust-based optimized virtual machine migration for dynamic load balancing and replica management in heterogeneous cloud

Cloud computing is an upcoming technology that has garnered interest from academic as well as commercial domains. Cloud offers the advantage of providing huge computing capability as well as resources that are positioned at multiple locations irrespective of time or location of the user. Cloud utilizes the concept of virtualization to dispatch the multiple tasks encountered simultaneously to the server. However, allocation of tasks to the heterogeneous servers requires that the load is balanced among the servers. To address this issue, a trust based dynamic load balancing algorithm in distributed file system is proposed. Load balancing is performed by predicting the loads in the physical machine with the help of the Rider optimization algorithm-based Neural Network (RideNN). Further, load balancing is carried out using the proposed Fractional Social Deer Optimization (FSDO) algorithm, where the virtual machine migration is performed based on the load condition in the physical machine. Later, replica management is accomplished for managing the replica in distributed file system with the help of the devised FSDO algorithm. Moreover, the proposed FSDO based dynamic load balancing algorithm is evaluated for its performance based on parameters, like predicted load, prediction error, trust, cost and energy consumption with values 0.051, 0.723, 0.390 and 0.431J correspondingly.

Challenges and Experiences in Designing Interpretable KPI-diagnostics for Cloud Applications

Automated root cause analysis of performance problems in modern cloud computing infrastructures is of a high technology value in the self-driving context. Those systems are evolved into large scale and complex solutions which are core for running most of today’s business applications. Hence, cloud management providers realize their mission through a “total” monitoring of data center flows thus enabling a full visibility into the cloud. Appropriate machine learning methods and software products rely on such observation data for real-time identification and remediation of potential sources of performance degradations in cloud operations to minimize their impacts. We describe the existing technology challenges and our experiences while working on designing problem root cause analysis mechanisms which are automatic, application agnostic, and, at the same time, interpretable for human operators to gain their trust. The paper focuses on diagnosis of cloud ecosystems through their Key Performance Indicators (KPI). Those indicators are utilized to build automatically labeled data sets and train explainable AI models for identifying conditions and processes “responsible” for misbehaviors. Our experiments on a large time series data set from a cloud application demonstrate that those approaches are effective in obtaining models that explain unacceptable KPI behaviors and localize sources of issues.

Enhancing Cloud Resource Management Based on Intelligent System

Cloud computing is a significant technology model with the strongest potential to change the way IT activities are carried out. The cloud offers low-cost and scalable IT resources. Cloud providers strive to improve business outcomes so cloud systems become more complex. The intelligent cloud has a number of issues, including optimizing the cloud service and designing and distributing resources adaptively and economically. There is a rising trend toward adopting intelligent technologies to better cloud management in particular. This paper introduces an intelligent method to manage cloud resources without delay or trouble. Starting with designing a system based on a genetic algorithm (GA) as a computational tool to achieve the goal and plan a predictive request then depending on the round robin (RR) algorithm to allocate the requests for processing. To evaluate the performance of this method, the proposed algorithm was verified in 145 requests. Where the implementation system achieved a reasonable result.

A statistical distribution-based pack-integrated model towards state estimation for lithium-ion batteries

The estimation of lithium battery pack is always an essential but troubling issue which has difficulty on considering the inconsistency during state estimation. Herein, an innovative statistical distribution-based pack-integrated model for lithium-ion batteries is proposed and applied for state estimation including state of charge and state of energy. The proposed method highlights the modelling concepts that the terminal voltage of the pack-integrated virtual cell is determined by all cells inside the pack, which takes the advantages of a designed dynamic-weighted terminal voltage according to the voltage distribution inside battery pack. Then, the issue of battery pack modelling and state estimation can be transferred into a virtual single cell and no longer have to consider the inconsistency within battery pack, with the advantages for further extending application from conventional battery modelling method based on single cell. Two kinds of mainstream batteries are experimented for validating, including lithium iron phosphate battery and LiNi0·5Co0·2Mn0·3O2, battery, and both have satisfactory precision, where the maximum error is about 1%–2%, and root mean squared error (RMSE) is eliminated to about 1%. The proposed method is validated with better precision performances on estimating states of battery pack with less calculation and storage, and can be applied both on embedded systems and cloud management platforms.

A Novel Approach of Reducing Energy Consumption by utilizing Big Data analysis in Mobile Cloud Computing

With the rapid proliferation of smart mobile devices and increasing adoption of cloud computing services, energy efficiency has become an important issue in mobile cloud environments. High energy consumption not only results in higher operational costs but also creates sustainability concerns related to cloud infrastructure and services. This paper proposes leveraging big data techniques such as machine learning and predictive analytics to optimize resource allocation and reduce energy consumption in mobile cloud computing. The massive amount of data on factors like user behavior, mobility patterns, network availability, and resource utilization can provide key insights to improve energy efficiency. We present an intelligent predictive framework to forecast mobile cloud resource demands and enable dynamic scaling of cloud configurations aligned to current needs. By proactively adapting cloud resources based on learned models and detected usage patterns, over-provisioning and under-utilization can be minimized. Specifically, we demonstrate how clustering, classification, regression, and times series models derived from contextual usage data can significantly improve energy efficiency when integrated with mobile cloud management systems. The proposed approaches are validated experimentally using simulated workloads and real-world trajectory data sets. Results indicate average energy savings of 42% and up to 62% for certain user groups compared to conventional cloud resource allocation techniques. This work provides an important contribution toward building more sustainable and energy efficient mobile cloud computing systems to meet the mobility and computing demands of the future through the transformative power of big data analytics.

Investigating the Security of EV Charging Mobile Applications as an Attack Surface

The adoption rate of EVs has witnessed a significant increase in recent years driven by multiple factors, chief among which is the increased flexibility and ease of access to charging infrastructure. To improve user experience and increase system flexibility, mobile applications have been incorporated into the EV charging ecosystem. EV charging mobile applications allow consumers to remotely trigger actions on charging stations and use functionalities such as start/stop charging sessions, pay for usage, and locate charging stations, to name a few. In this article, we study the security posture of the EV charging ecosystem against a new type of remote that exploits vulnerabilities in the EV charging mobile applications as an attack surface. We leverage a combination of static and dynamic analysis techniques to analyze the security of widely used EV charging mobile applications. Our analysis was performed on 31 of the most widely used mobile applications including their interactions with various components such as cloud management systems. The attack scenarios that exploit these vulnerabilities were verified on a real-time co-simulation test bed. Our discoveries indicate the lack of user/vehicle verification and improper authorization for critical functions, which allow adversaries to remotely hijack charging sessions and launch attacks against the connected critical infrastructure. The attacks were demonstrated using the EVCS mobile applications showing the feasibility and the applicability of our attacks. Indeed, we discuss specific remote attack scenarios and their impact on EV users. More importantly, our analysis results demonstrate the feasibility of leveraging existing vulnerabilities across various EV charging mobile applications to perform wide-scale coordinated remote charging/discharging attacks against the connected critical infrastructure (e.g., power grid), with significant economical and operational implications. Finally, we propose countermeasures to secure the infrastructure and impede adversaries from performing reconnaissance and launching remote attacks using compromised accounts.

Online cloud management and quality monitoring of the whole process of undergraduate thesis

Abstract The undergraduate thesis is an important practical teaching part of the undergraduate teaching program, and it is important to manage its quality. In this paper, an online cloud management system for the thesis is designed according to the requirement analysis, and the ARIMA model in time series is used to predict the number of thesis supervisors by the supervisor and give a reminder for the supervisor’s guidance decision. For the risk management of dissertation progress, a Bayesian network-based assessment method is proposed. From the perspective of dissertation similarity, a process of dissertation quality analysis based on the SimHash algorithm is constructed. The average error rate of ARIMA is only 0.190, which is optimized to a certain extent compared with other algorithms. 20 samples of the inference operation results have no sample with the probability of the dissertation progress delay level at High below 40%.

XBot2D: towards a robotics hybrid cloud architecture for field robotics.

Nowadays, robotics applications requiring the execution of complex tasks in real-world scenarios are still facing many challenges related to highly unstructured and dynamic environments in domains such as emergency response and search and rescue where robots have to operate for prolonged periods trading off computational performance with increased power autonomy and vice versa. In particular, there is a crucial need for robots capable of adapting to such settings while at the same time providing robustness and extended power autonomy. A possible approach to overcome the conflicting demand of a computational performing system with the need for long power autonomy is represented by cloud robotics, which can boost the computational capabilities of the robot while reducing the energy consumption by exploiting the offload of resources to the cloud. Nevertheless, the communication constraint due to limited bandwidth, latency, and connectivity, typical of field robotics, makes cloud-enabled robotics solutions challenging to deploy in real-world applications. In this context, we designed and realized the XBot2D software architecture, which provides a hybrid cloud manager capable of dynamically and seamlessly allocating robotics skills to perform a distributed computation based on the current network condition and the required latency, and computational/energy resources of the robot in use. The proposed framework leverage on the two dimensions, i.e., 2D (local and cloud), in a transparent way for the user, providing support for Real-Time (RT) skills execution on the local robot, as well as machine learning and A.I. resources on the cloud with the possibility to automatically relocate the above based on the required performances and communication quality. XBot2D implementation and its functionalities are presented and validated in realistic tasks involving the CENTAURO robot and the Amazon Web Service Elastic Computing Cloud (AWS EC2) infrastructure with different network conditions.

An efficient load balancing technique using CAViaR-HHO enabled VM migration and replica management in cloud computing

Cloud computing is immense technology that offers distributed resources to a number of users who are present throughout the world. Cloud model is comprised of numerous virtual machines (VMs) and physical machines (PMs) to carry out user tasks effectively in a parallel manner but in some cases, the demand of the users may be high that resulting in the overloading of PMs and this condition deteriorates the performance of cloud network. For achieving effective virtualization in the cloud paradigm, energy and resource utilization are major properties that should be handled effectively and such properties are accomplished through effective management of workload by distributing load equivalently among VMs. By doing so, resource utilization of the network is enhanced and it only requires minimum energy to process the tasks. Numerous load-balancing algorithms have been introduced earlier to maintain load in a cloud environment, nevertheless, they are devoid of mitigating the number of task migrations. Hence, this research proposes an effective load balancing algorithm and replica management method using the proposed Conditional Autoregressive Value at risk by Regression Quantiles-Horse Herd Optimization (CAViaR-HHO) model. Here, the load is computed by considering some factors like Central Processing Unit (CPU), Million Instructions per Second (MIPS), bandwidth, memory, and frequency. VM migration and replica migration is effectively carried out using the proposed CAViaR-HHO model. Meanwhile, the developed method is devised by integration of Conditional Autoregressive Value at risk by Regression Quantiles (CAViaR) with Horse Herd Optimization Algorithm (HOA). However, the proposed CAViaR-HHO has achieved a load with a minimum value of 0.109, capacity with a maximum value of 0.591, resource utilization with a maximum value of 0.467, and minimum cost of 0.344. Using setup-1, when the number of tasks is 500, the capacity of the proposed method is 5.58%, 3.89%, 2.87%, 1.52%, and 0.67% higher when compared to the existing approaches namely, C-FDLA, K-means clustering + LB, Adaptive starvation threshold, EIMORM, and Dynamic replica creation method.

Cloud computing resource load prediction based on improved VMD and attention mechanism

Dynamic adjustment of resource supply according to users’ resource load is one of the important technologies to achieve efficient management of cloud computing resources. In order to accurately obtain users’ demand for resource load in the future, based on quantum particle swarm optimization (QPSO), a prediction model QVMD_AM_LSTM was proposed to optimize variational mode decomposition (VMD) and to add attention mechanism to AM_LSTM. A comparative experiment was conducted on the open-source dataset cluster-trace-v2018 from Alibaba Cloud. The outcomes show that compared with LSTM, AM-LSTM, GRU-LSTM, Refined-LSTM, Stacked-LSTM and other existing prediction models, the mean square error of the QVMD_AM_LSTM model proposed in this article decreases by 8-14, and the correlation coefficient rises by 6%-11%. QVMD_AM_LSTM model has higher prediction accuracy.

Forecast-Assisted Service Function Chain Dynamic Deployment for SDN/NFV-Enabled Cloud Management Systems

Software-defined network (SDN) and network function virtualization (NFV) are acknowledged as the most promising technologies to effectively allocate resource for network service. A service function chain (SFC), which can deploy virtualized network functions (VNFs) and chain them with associated flows allocation, can be used to represent each network service owing to the introduction of the SDN/NFV technology. Co-hosted applications on multiple Internet of Things terminals have dynamic and time-varying service requirements, in order to allocate network resources optimally and meet the end-to-end delay requirements of services, sufficient strategies are required to satisfy the continuously changing service demands. In this article, a deep learning model that combines the multitask regression layer above the graph neural networks is first presented to predict the future resource requirements of each VNF instance. The SFC deployment problem is then solved using the integer nonlinear programming (INLP) approach, and a novel prediction-assisted Viterbi algorithm is presented to overcome the scalability problem of the INLP approach. According to the simulation findings, the proposed deep model provides a minimum of a 6.2% improvement in prediction accuracy over baseline prediction models, and the proposed SFC deployment strategy has been demonstrated to deliver better performance in terms of acceptance ratio and revenue, compared to the current passive deployment algorithms.

High Throughput VMs Placement With Constrained Communication Overhead and Provable Guarantees

Placement of VMs in the cloud is one of the most fundamental problems in systems research. Traditionally, placement algorithms assume that the schedulers have complete information about the currently available resources at each host. However, this assumption is in many cases unrealistic, as gathering fresh status information from each of the thousands of hosts in a large data center incurs excessive communication overhead, which results in long queueing delays. Efforts to resolve this problem by employing several parallel schedulers typically exhibit collisions when several schedulers are simultaneously trying to place VMs on the same host. Our work analyzes the performance of various placement algorithms and provides empirical evidence that using multiple randomized schedulers obtains high throughput, while significantly decreasing both the communication overhead, and the number of collisions between schedulers. We, therefore, introduce Adaptive Partial State Random (APSR) – an efficient parallel random resource management algorithm that samples only from a small number of hosts and dynamically adjusts the degree of parallelism to provide provable guarantees on the probability of collisions between distinct schedulers. We formally analyze APSR, evaluate it on real workloads, and integrate it into the popular OpenStack cloud management platform. Our evaluation shows that APSR matches the throughput provided by other parallel schedulers, while achieving up to 13x lower decline ratio and a reduction of over 85% in communication overheads.

MFGAD-INT: in-band network telemetry data-driven anomaly detection using multi-feature fusion graph deep learning

As the cloud services market grows, cloud management tools that detect network anomalies in a non-intrusive manner are critical to improve users’ experience of cloud services. However, some network anomalies, such as Microburst, in cloud systems are very discreet. Network monitoring methods, e.g., SNMP, Ping, are of coarse temporal granularity or low-dimension metrics, have difficulty to identify such anomalies quickly and accurately. Network telemetry is able to collect rich network metrics with fine temporal granularity, which can provide deep insight into network anomalies. However, the rich features in the telemetry data are insufficient exploited in existing research. This paper proposes a Multi-feature Fusion Graph Deep learning approach driven by the In-band Network Telemetry, shorted as MFGAD-INT, to efficiently extract and process the spatial-temporal correlation information in telemetry data and effectively identify the anomalies. The experimental results show that the accuracy performance of the proposed method improves about 10.56% compared to the anomaly detection method without network telemetry and about 9.73% compared to the network telemetry-based method.

IoT-Based Big Data Secure Transmission and Management over Cloud System: A Healthcare Digital Twin Scenario

The Internet of Things (IoT) was introduced as a recently developed technology in the telecommunications field. It is a network made up of real-world objects, things, and gadgets that are enabled by sensors and software that can communicate data with one another. Systems for monitoring gather, exchange, and process video and image data captured by sensors and cameras across a network. Furthermore, the novel concept of Digital Twin offers new opportunities so that new proposed systems can work virtually, but without differing in operation from a “real” system. This paper is a meticulous survey of the IoT and monitoring systems to illustrate how their combination will improve certain types of the Monitoring systems of Healthcare–IoT in the Cloud. To achieve this goal, we discuss the characteristics of the IoT that improve the use of the types of monitoring systems over a Multimedia Transmission System in the Cloud. The paper also discusses some technical challenges of Multimedia in IoT, based on Healthcare data. Finally, it shows how the Mobile Cloud Computing (MCC) technology, settled as base technology, enhances the functionality of the IoT and has an impact on various types of monitoring technology, and also it proposes an algorithm approach to transmitting and processing video/image data through a Cloud-based Monitoring system. To gather pertinent data about the validity of our proposal in a more safe and useful way, we have implemented our proposal in a Digital Twin scenario of a Smart Healthcare system. The operation of the suggested scenario as a Digital Twin scenario offers a more sustainable and energy-efficient system and experimental findings ultimately demonstrate that the proposed system is more reliable and secure. Experimental results show the impact of our proposed model depicts the efficiency of the usage of a Cloud Management System operated over a Digital Twin scenario, using real-time large-scale data produced from the connected IoT system. Through these scenarios, we can observe that our proposal remains the best choice regardless of the time difference or energy load.

Energy‐efficiency and sustainability in new generation cloud computing: A vision and directions for integrated management of data centre resources and workloads

AbstractCloud computing has become a critical infrastructure for modern society, like electric power grids and roads. As the backbone of the modern economy, it offers subscription‐based computing services anytime, anywhere, on a pay‐as‐you‐go basis. Its use is growing exponentially with the continued development of new classes of applications driven by a huge number of emerging networked devices. However, the success of Cloud computing has created a new global energy challenge, as it comes at the cost of vast energy usage. Currently, data centres hosting Cloud services world‐wide consume more energy than most countries. Globally, by 2025, they are projected to consume 20% of global electricity and emit up to 5.5% of the world's carbon emissions. In addition, a significant part of the energy consumed is transformed into heat which leads to operational problems, including a reduction in system reliability and the life expectancy of devices, and escalation in cooling requirements. Therefore, for the future generations of Cloud computing to address the environmental and operational consequences of such significant energy usage, they must become energy‐efficient and environmentally sustainable while continuing to deliver high‐quality services. In this article, we propose a vision for learning‐centric approach for the integrated management of new generation Cloud computing environments to reduce their energy consumption and carbon footprint while delivering service quality guarantees. In this article, we identify the dimensions and key issues of integrated resource management and our envisioned approaches to address them. We present a conceptual architecture for energy‐efficient new generation Clouds and early results on the integrated management of resources and workloads that evidence its potential benefits towards energy efficiency and sustainability.

Aveiro Tech City Living Lab: A Communication, Sensing, and Computing Platform for City Environments

This article presents the deployment and experimentation architecture of the Aveiro Tech City Living Lab (ATCLL) in Aveiro, Portugal. This platform comprises a large number of Internet-of-things (IoT) devices with communication, sensing and computing capabilities. The communication infrastructure, built on fiber and Millimeter-wave (mmWave) links, integrates a communication network with radio terminals (WiFi, ITS-G5, C-V2X, 5G and LoRa(WAN)), multiprotocol, spread throughout 44 connected points of access in the city. Additionally, public transportation has also been equipped with communication and sensing units. All these points combine and interconnect a set of sensors, such as mobility (radars, light detection and rangings (LiDARs), video cameras) and environmental sensors. Combining edge computing and cloud management to deploy the services and manage the platform, and a data platform to gather and process the data, the living lab supports a wide range of services and applications: IoT, intelligent transport systems (ITSs) and assisted driving, environmental monitoring, emergency and safety, among others. This article describes the architecture, implementation and deployment to make the overall platform to work and integrate researchers and citizens. Moreover, it showcases some examples of the performance metrics achieved in the city infrastructure, the data that can be collected, visualized and used to build services and applications to the cities, and, finally, different use cases in the mobility and safety scenarios.

Efficient Computation of Optimal Thresholds in Cloud Auto-scaling Systems

We consider a horizontal and dynamic auto-scaling technique in a cloud system where virtual machines hosted on a physical node are turned on and off to minimise energy consumption while meeting performance requirements. Finding cloud management policies that adapt the system to the load is not straightforward, and we consider here that virtual machines are turned on and off depending on queue load thresholds. We want to compute the optimal threshold values that minimize consumption costs and penalty costs (when performance requirements are not met). To solve this problem, we propose several optimisation methods, based on two different mathematical approaches. The first one is based on queueing theory and uses local search heuristics coupled with the stationary distributions of Markov chains. The second approach tackles the problem using Markov Decision Process (MDP) in which we assume that the policy is of a special multi-threshold type called hysteresis. We improve the heuristics of the former approach with the aggregation of Markov chains and queues approximation techniques. We assess the benefit of threshold-aware algorithms for solving MDPs. Then we carry out theoretical analyzes of the two approaches. We also compare them numerically and we show that all of the presented MDP algorithms strongly outperform the local search heuristics. Finally, we propose a cost model for a real scenario of a cloud system to apply our optimisation algorithms and to show their practical relevance. The major scientific contribution of the article is a set of fast (almost in real time) load-based threshold computation methods that can be used by a cloud provider to optimize its financial costs.