PaaS Providers Research Articles

DeMETER in clouds: detection of malicious external thread execution in runtime with machine learning in PaaS clouds

Current state of PaaS allows rapid outsourcing of web applications without noticeable configuration effort. It could be foreseen that a noteworthy security guarantee in this cloud deployment model make organizations adopt PaaS easier. To date, provisioning security-guaranteed PaaS offerings required isolated processes, which is computationally-intensive and therefore expensive for the cloud provider. A novel security mechanism is proposed in this study to protect the PaaS providers against malicious behavior; thereby, their tenants. The mechanism does not strictly isolate tenants, but let them share the resources as in conventional web applications; therefore the computational efficiency is competitive. The novelty lies in classifying the malicious behavior of worker threads of web applications in a privacy-friendly way; where possible, without interfering with the threads. These threads may execute many code snippets in the same process context on behalf of the provider, the tenants or the tenants’ users in a web application server. It is cumbersome and error-prone to isolate each code snippet separately. Instead, classifying thread behavior helps to detect malicious flow of execution. The proposed mechanism is significantly different from intrusion detection systems or virus scanners as it only focuses on the processor usage and critical resource access. Historical web application attacks based on OWASP reports as well as future trends are analyzed and a sample web traffic of 100,000 requests, which includes 1% malicious traffic rooted from the most common attacks, is generated to prove the concept. The generated web traffic is tested on a cloud-based demo application on a live cloud environment. The thread behavior is monitored only based on CPU load and database access to keep the mechanism privacy-friendly for all cloud stakeholders. Even though the executed instructions are not monitored, the collected telemetry forms a vast amount of trace for classification. This privacy-friendly feature set is extracted and evaluated on several classifiers to detect malicious threads. It is observed that the classification accuracy is remarkably successful.

Success-Driving Business Model Characteristics of IaaS and PaaS Providers

Success-Driving Business Model Characteristics of IaaS and PaaS Providers

Бізнес-моделі хмарного надання ІТ-послуг

Бізнес-моделі хмарного надання ІТ-послуг

Modeling and deploying hybrid tenant requests with shared networklets

In recent years, IaaS providers are trying to cater to application layer development, PaaS providers are exposing more infrastructure APIs to customers, and SaaS providers start to allow tenants to build their apps within their software. All of these indicate that, the popular wisdom that cloud computing comes in three flavors—IaaS, PaaS, and SaaS—no longer describes reality. The lines between IaaS, PaaS, and SaaS are becoming blurred as datacenter providers seek to create cloud platforms that can satisfy the needs of enterprises and widen their appeal to developers. In hybrid datacenters, resource requests from tenants are increasingly transforming into hybrid requests that may simultaneously demand IaaS, PaaS, and SaaS resources. This paper tackles the challenge of modeling and deploying hybrid tenant resource requests in datacenter networks, for which we coin “networklet” to represent a set of VMs that collaboratively provide some PaaS or SaaS service. Through extracting networklets from tenant requests and thus sharing them between multiple tenants, we can achieve a win-win situation for datacenter providers and tenants. Extensive evaluations show that, the proposed model and deployment algorithm indeed reduce the completion time of tenant requests while maintaining performance guarantee.

Success-Driving Business Model Characteristics of IaaS and PaaS Providers

Success-Driving Business Model Characteristics of IaaS and PaaS Providers

A Scheduling Algorithm based on PSO Heuristic in Cloud Computing

The goal of the SaaS provider is the most protable; the user's goal is to meet requirements as quickly as possible but still within budget and deadline. The algorithm's aim gives the schedule to satisfy the objectives of the agents, this is a very difficult problem. This article studies heuristic PSO (Particle Swarm Optimization) and model of components in the cloud computing to propose a model of PaaS providers; admission control algorithm and scheduling for the user’s requirements towards multi-objective optimization of time.The schedule given by the algorithm in order to: (1) optimizing the time for the user, (2) providing the greatest benefits for SaaS providers, (3) satisfying for the constraints of QoS (Quality of Service ) of the user. The result of the algorithm is installed and compared with other algorithms on CloudSim.

Docker ecosystem – Vulnerability Analysis

Cloud based infrastructures have typically leveraged virtualization. However, the need for always shorter development cycles, continuous delivery and cost savings in infrastructures, led to the rise of containers. Indeed, containers provide faster deployment than virtual machines and near-native performance. In this paper, we study the security implications of the use of containers in typical use-cases, through a vulnerability-oriented analysis of the Docker ecosystem. Indeed, among all container solutions, Docker is currently leading the market. More than a container solution, it is a complete packaging and software delivery tool. In this paper we provide several contributions: we first provide a thorough survey on related work in the area, organizing them in security-driven categories, and later we perform an analysis of the containers security ecosystem. In particular, using a top-down approach, we identify in the different components of the Docker environment several vulnerabilities—present by design or introduced by some original use-cases. Moreover, we detail real world scenarios where these vulnerabilities could be exploited, propose possible fixes, and, finally discuss the adoption of Docker by PaaS providers.

SLA‐based PaaS profit optimization

SummaryThe socioeconomic impact of cloud solutions and particularly PaaS (platform as a service) solutions is becoming increasingly critical. The main objective of PaaS providers is to generate the maximum profit from the services they provide. This requires them to face a number of challenges such as efficiently managing the underlying resources and satisfying the SLAs of the hosted applications. In this paper, we consider a cloud‐bursting PaaS environment where the PaaS provider owns some private resources and is able to rent public cloud resources on demand. In that context, we propose a profit‐efficient solution for managing such a system under SLA constraints. We define a profit optimization policy that evaluates the cost of hosting each application using public and private resources and chooses the option that generates the highest profit. During peak periods, the optimization policy considers two more options. The first option is to obtain some resources from running applications, taking into account the payment of penalties if their promised quality of service is affected. The second option is to wait until private resources become available, taking into account the payment of penalties if the quality of service promised to the new application is affected. Furthermore, we designed and implemented an open cloud‐bursting PaaS system, called Meryn, which integrates the proposed optimization policy and provides support for batch and MapReduce applications. The results of our evaluation show the effectiveness of our approach in optimizing the provider profit. Indeed, compared to a basic approach, our approach provides up to 11.59% and 9.02% more provider profit in, respectively, simulations and experiments.

PaaS Death Watch?

PaaS, or Platform-as-a-Service, is something that is not used as much as initially predicted within enterprises. While PaaS offerings vary greatly, most provide facilities for application design, deployment, testing, and self-provisioned hosting. More advanced services may exist in the offering as well, such as team collaboration, database integration, middleware services, Web service integration, storage, state management, and version management services. However, these patterns are not at all consistent from PaaS provider to PaaS provider, and this leads to some major confusion in the emerging PaaS space, as well as amongst enterprises that are looking to implement PaaS.

Towards standard PaaS implementation APIs

Platform as a service (PaaS) supports application developers with the ability to implement and deploy their applications in the cloud. Several heterogeneous PaaS platforms are available, such as Google App Engine (GAE), Windows Azure, Cloud Foundry, and OpenShift. Each PaaS provider has its own proprietary implementation and deployment APIs. The heterogeneity of these APIs makes developers worry about their application portability and interoperability. The work in this paper concerns about the heterogeneity of different PaaS implementation APIs. Standard PaaS implementation APIs, called Std-PaaS APIs, have been proposed to solve the application portability problem. Std-PaaS APIs allow developers to develop generic cloud application by writing their applications once and deploying many times on heterogeneous PaaS providers. Std-PaaS APIs have been evaluated using two case studies, in which generic APIs for cloud persistentstorage service and NoSQL datastore service have been developed and used to developed applications to be deployed onto GAE and Windows Azure.

Towards standard PaaS implementation APIs

Platform as a service (PaaS) supports application developers with the ability to implement and deploy their applications in the cloud. Several heterogeneous PaaS platforms are available, such as Google App Engine (GAE), Windows Azure, Cloud Foundry, and OpenShift. Each PaaS provider has its own proprietary implementation and deployment APIs. The heterogeneity of these APIs makes developers worry about their application portability and interoperability. The work in this paper concerns about the heterogeneity of different PaaS implementation APIs. Standard PaaS implementation APIs, called Std-PaaS APIs, have been proposed to solve the application portability problem. Std-PaaS APIs allow developers to develop generic cloud application by writing their applications once and deploying many times on heterogeneous PaaS providers. Std-PaaS APIs have been evaluated using two case studies, in which generic APIs for cloud persistentstorage service and NoSQL datastore service have been developed and used to developed applications to be deployed onto GAE and Windows Azure.

Ontologies for Platform as Service APIs Interoperability

Abstract Ontologies can be used to describe common cloud functionalities and enable common terminology to assist in cloud interoperability. In this work, we have developed the ontology for resources and operations and the ontology of interoperability problems. The aim is to clearly describe and categorize the existing functionalities, features and specificities of commercial platform asaservice offers. The first ontology also provides data type mappings among different Paa Sstorages and cross-Paa Sdata types used in inputs and outputs of the remote APIoperations to provideacommon layer for information exchange and data migration among different Paa Sproviders. The ontologies were evaluated by tools and by human experts. Furthermore, the ontologies were used in cloud interoperability prototype to show their practical applicability.

Energy Aware Pricing in a Three-Tiered Cloud Service Market

We consider a three-tiered cloud service market and propose an energy efficient pricing strategy in this market. Here, the end customers are served by the Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) providers, who implement customized services for their customers. To host these services, these SaaS providers, in turn, lease the infrastructure related resources from the Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) or Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) providers. In this paper, we propose and evaluate a mechanism for pricing between SaaS providers and Iaas/PaaS providers and between SaaS providers and the end customers. The pricing scheme is designed in a way such that the integration of renewable energy is promoted, which is a very crucial aspect of energy efficiency. Thereafter, we propose a technique to strategically provide an improved Quality of Service (QoS) by deploying more resources than what is computed by the optimization procedure. This technique is based on the square root staffing law in queueing theory. We carry out numerical evaluations with real data traces on electricity price, renewable energy generation, workload, etc., in order to emulate the real dynamics of the cloud service market. We demonstrate that, under practical assumptions, the proposed technique can generate more profit for the service providers operating in the cloud service market.

A semantic recommendation algorithm for the PaaSport platform-as-a-service marketplace

Platform as a service (PaaS) is one of the Cloud computing services that provide a computing platform in the Cloud, allowing customers to develop, run, and manage web applications without the complexity of building and maintaining the infrastructure. The primary disadvantage for an SME to enter the emerging PaaS market is the possibility of being locked into a certain platform, mostly provided by the market's giants. The PaaSport project focuses on facilitating SMEs to deploy business applications on the best-matching Cloud PaaS offering and to seamlessly migrate these applications on demand, via a thin, non-intrusive Cloud-broker, in the form of a Cloud PaaS Marketplace. PaaSport enables PaaS provider SMEs to roll out semantically interoperable PaaS offerings, by annotating them using a unified PaaS semantic model that has been defined as an OWL ontology. In this paper we focus on the recommendation algorithm that has been developed on top of the ontology, for providing the application developer with recommendations about the best-matching Cloud PaaS offering. The algorithm consists of: a) a matchmaking part, where the functional parameters of the application are taken into account to rule out inconsistent offerings, and b) a ranking part, where the non-functional parameters of the application are considered to score and rank offerings. Τhe algorithm is extensively evaluated showing linear scalability to the number of offerings and application requirements. Furthermore, it is extensible upon future semantic model extensions, because it is agnostic to domain specific concepts and parameters, using SPARQL template queries.

A survey on elasticity management in PaaS systems

Elasticity is a goal of cloud computing. An elastic system should manage in an autonomic way its resources, being adaptive to dynamic workloads, allocating additional resources when workload is increased and deallocating resources when workload decreases. PaaS providers should manage resources of customer applications with the aim of converting those applications into elastic services. This survey identifies the requirements that such management imposes on a PaaS provider: autonomy, scalability, adaptivity, SLA awareness, composability and upgradeability. This document delves into the variety of mechanisms that have been proposed to deal with all those requirements. Although there are multiple approaches to address those concerns, providers' main goal is maximisation of profits. This compels providers to look for balancing two opposed goals: maximising quality of service and minimising costs. Because of this, there are still several aspects that deserve additional research for finding optimal adaptability strategies. Those open issues are also discussed.

Implementing generic PaaS deployment API: repackaging and deploying applications on heterogeneous PaaS platforms

The cloud platform-as-a-service (PaaS) model provides developers with the ability to deploy and manage their applications remotely in the cloud and pay only for actual usage hours. Currently, there is no standard API for PaaS deployment and management; each PaaS provider [e.g., Google AppEngine (GAE), OpenShift (OS), Cloud Foundry (CF), and Windows Azure] has its own proprietary APIs. This lack of standardisation adds a layer of complexity to application deployment and migration between heterogeneous PaaS platforms because of API incompatibility. A standard (generic) PaaS deployment API overcomes the previously mentioned PaaS API heterogeneity. A generic open-source API, namely the COAPS API, has been proposed to support deployment and management of applications on CF and OS PaaS platforms. This work implements COAPS deployment API to include the GAE PaaS. Whereas both CF and OS PaaS platforms use the same application packaging, deploying the same application on GAE requires application repackaging. We evaluated our work using a case study in which the same application is automatically deployed on CF and GAE.

A Platform as a Service Billing Model for Cloud Computing Management Approaches

Platform as a Service (PaaS) billing needs an effective billing strategy. In this paper we proceeded a literature review and proposed a new billing model for a PaaS provider. Our billing model allows charges to PaaS clients in several policies, from specific plans to fully pay-per-use. We automated our billing model in a monitoring and management software tool. The model and the tool were validated through a case study in a software development company. The results indicated that our model is useful and preferable in relation to current billing policies and can be used in PaaS management.

EHealth Spare Parts as a Service: Modular eHealth Solutions and Medical Device Reform

eHealth Platform as a Service (‘PaaS’) is an innovative way to build mHealth apps out of cloud-based generic components. Having examined the current and future regimes of safety and performance, this paper concludes that the ‘selling features’ of the PaaS (outsourced creation and maintenance of cloud-based parts for easy mHealth-building) undermine legal compliance, and the reform will not change this significantly. Although no safety and performance requirements apply yet to consumer eHealth, the medical apps are regulated. Their manufacturers must ensure the final apps are safe, while not being in control of the parts composing the apps. Generic components not meant for a specific medical device and their providers are not subject to safety and performance requirements. Market will likely push PaaS providers to offer mHealth manufacturers tools to ensure and control safety and performance when medical apps are concerned. I foresee no such incentives for consumer mHealth.

EHealth Spare Parts as a Service: Modular eHealth Solutions and Medical Device Reform

Abstract eHealth Platform as a Service (‘PaaS’) is an innovative way to build mHealth apps out of cloud-based generic components. Having examined the current and future regimes of safety and performance, this article concludes that the ‘selling features’ of the PaaS (outsourced creation and maintenance of cloud-based parts for easy mHealth-building) undermine legal compliance, and the reform will not change this significantly. Although no safety and performance requirements apply yet to consumer eHealth, the medical apps are regulated. Their manufacturers must ensure the final apps are safe, while not being in control of the parts composing the apps. Generic components not meant for a specific medical device and their providers are not subject to safety and performance requirements. Market will likely push PaaS providers to offer mHealth manufacturers tools to ensure and control safety and performance when medical apps are concerned. I foresee no such incentives for consumer mHealth.

Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS): Model and Security Issues

Cloud computing is making a big revolution in the field of information technology thereby reducing capital expenditures spent. Computing is delivered as a service enabling effective utilization of computational resources. Certain security issues exist which prevents individuals and industries from using clouds despite its advantages. Resolving such problems may increase the usage of cloud thereby reducing the amount spent for resources. The paper focuses on one of the three service delivery models, Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS). PaaS model, layers in PaaS and PaaS providers are described along with the security issues encountered in PaaS clouds. The issues along with solutions discussed provide an insight into PaaS security for both providers and users which may help in future PaaS design and implementation. DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.11591/telkomnika.v15i1.8073