Experiment Case Study

QoS Oriented Service Management in Large Scale Federated Clouds

The challenge
Real-time or near real-time services that can be delivered to internal or external users in the form of cloud services are amongst the top 10 strategic technology trends for 2013
Gartner Research The emergence of clouds has made feasible the delivery of Internet-scale services through the commoditization of IT assets and on-demand usage patterns. While the research community has been providing outcomes to overcome limitations and address new challenges, one has to consider that Future Internet applications require for environments that can facilitate real-time and interactivity. The latter highlights the need for infrastructures being able to efficiently adapt resource provisioning to dynamic Quality of Service (QoS) demands.

Building Reliable Computing Services on Clouds

A representative example of such a real-time application is from the domain of computer vision. The application consists of two application service components, each one realizing specific algorithms for objects and processes identification and recognition. The first component uses Hidden Markov Models for processes identification and categorization. The training phase for these models demands heavy processing and memory requirements. Visual features are extracted for each image frame; the models are trained with a long time series (i.e. video sequences of long duration), the model parameters are stored and re-used in the testing phase for the remaining video frames. The second service component of the computer vision application is the process recognition service. It allows experts to define restricted areas in a factory / industry, the intrusion of which may be severe as far as quality assurance for the products is concerned, safety and security. When exploiting these components in large-scale industrial environments, like for example the full sectors of a factory, the aforementioned limitations lead to insuperable obstacles, thus making the components a practically non-implementable tool. What is more, during process identification and recognition, based on the number of processes or the engaged employees additional resources may be required in order to provide outcomes at real-time. Taking the above into consideration, enabling real-time applications such as the computer vision one,

Amazon found that every 100ms of latency cost them 1% in sales - a broker could lose $4 million in revenues per millisecond if their electronic trading platform is 5 milliseconds behind the competition

requires large-scale cloud environments that can fulfil their real-time needs and adapt resource provisioning based on emerging requirements at runtime.

Research in the areas of cloud computing and multimedia is amongst the core activities of the Distributed, Knowledge and Media Systems Group of the Institute of Communications and Computer Systems - National Technical University of Athens (ICCS/NTUA). The gr oup is one of the institutions largest in terms of staff size and research activities, employing PhD-level scientists and being devoted to research activities in the fields of distributed systems, next-generation service architectures design and management, performance analysis and evaluation, application modelling and other advanced research areas.

Service Management approaches consider the full lifecycle of service-based systems providing support for QoS guarantees in Clouds

The solution QoS-oriented Service Management

ICCS/NTUA has designed and developed a set of mechanisms that enable the provision of QoS guarantees in cloud infrastructures. They incorporate an orchestration framework that allows for workflow management in the case of non-monolithic applications, an adaptable monitoring mechanism that collects and aggregates monitoring information from application and infrastructure levels, and an evaluator service enabling runtime adaptability through provisioning policies. The QoS-oriented Service Management mechanisms follow a hierarchical architectural approach, the

QoS-Oriented Service Management

added-value of which is that information and the corresponding decisions are taken on each level within the time-constraints posed by soft real-time applications.

Orchestration
Non-monolithic applications

Adaptable Monitoring
Application and infrastructure levels

Event Management
Provisioning policies and runtime adaptability

The mechanisms that have been evaluated in several experiments including the following key components: Orchestration / Workflow Management: Realized through a workflow manager and several workflow enactors following a hierarchical architecture, it enables direct control, configuration and management of the application services since enactors are deployed in each VM along with the application services. It also receives notifications from the event evaluator regarding corrective actions. Adaptable Monitoring: Realized through a monitoring manager and several monitoring instances, it collects information on infrastructure and application levels on time intervals dynamically defined based on the collected monitoring data. The manager orchestrates the monitoring instances of all VMs and has access to the aggregated information. Moreover, it serves different and concurrent application service components that are being deployed in the same or different VMs. Besides, the manager generates events based on the monitoring information which are being handled by the event evaluator . Events Management: Realized through an event evaluator, a component that receives events from monitoring and triggers corrective actions for runtime adaptability based on specific rules applicable to the application and / or the infrastructure.

Results
Adaptable monitoring enhanced with dynamic thresholds on monitoring data triggering proactive deadline-driven deployments
Can clouds facilitate real-time and interactivity? BonFIRE allows us to answer this fundamental question! In our experiment, we focused on mechanisms and tools that will allow real-time interactive applications to be executed on clouds. Even though we have developed these mechanisms in the framework of a European project, we have never tested them in a real cloud environment. We have never tested them in a large scale facility that consists of multiple heterogeneous cloud resources spread across different sites. Experimentation on BonFIRE provided valuable results regarding the scalability, reliability and efficiency of the mechanisms, the consequences of network conditions on their operation, and the potential unexpected behaviour of real-time applications due to heterogeneous physical resources. Obtained experimentation results were exploited to optimize the operation of the mechanisms both in terms of functionality through for example the incorporation of dynamic thresholds in monitoring data and in terms of operation to achieve lower

Low-latency service management mechanisms to facilitate real-time

levels of latency.

Added value of using BonFIRE

The broad experimentation both for the service management mechanisms and for the real-time computer vision application could not be conducted in another (private or public) cloud environment due to the differentiator capabilities and unique features offered by BonFIRE facility: Controlled deployment & on-demand resources on multi-site clouds: Can real-time requirements be fulfilled during runtime with on-demand provision of resources?

Real-time computer vision on a multi-site federated cloud facility

Heterogeneous resources: Do heterogeneous physical resources result to unexpected behaviour of real-time applications?

Multi-site geographically distributed facility: How scalable and reliable are the mechanisms on a scalable federated cloud facility with geographically distributed sites?

BonFIRE Monitoring information at different levels: How efficient is the SILICON monitoring mechanism?

The picture today

Varying network conditions: How do different network conditions affect the operation of the mechanisms given their hierarchical architecture?

Next steps
The proven efficiency and maturity of the QoS-oriented service management mechanisms will

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provide the ground for their utilization mainly by the Greek IT industry, aiming to exploit them in emerging cloud infrastructures, highlighting to their customers real-time feasibility as a key differentiator. What is more, the real-time computer vision application will provide a second route for exploitation activities targeting identified industrial environments.

Your free and open Cloud testbed

BonFIRE Facility: open for experimentation

Following two successful Open Calls that have given academic researchers, developers and SMEs access to the Cloud infrastructures in BonFIRE, it is possible to apply for running experiments as part of the Open Access initiative. This is your chance to get involved and test your innovative ideas for free!

In Open Access, you will have access to a multi-site Cloud facility for applications, services and systems experimentation: Large-scale, heterogeneous and virtualised compute, storage and networking resources Full control of your resource deployment In-depth monitoring and logging of both physical and virtual resources Advanced Cloud and network features Ease of use of experimentation

BonFIRE allows users to evaluate the effects of converged service and network infrastructures; assess the socio-economic impact of new Cloud services; and to combine Cloud computing and data storage with novel networking scenarios. Essentially, BonFIRE enables developers to research new, faster, cheaper or more flexible ways of running applications. Open Access will continue through 2014.

BonFIRE Project
The BonFIRE Project has funded experiments selected trough two open calls. This series of public case studies highlights the challenges and results of each experiment and the added value of the BonFIRE multi-cloud facility.

The BonFIRE consortium brings together world leading industrial and academic organisations in cloud computing to deliver a robust, reliable and sustainable facility for large scale experimentally-driven cloud research.

The research leading to these results has received funding from the European Commission's Seventh Framework Programme (FP7/2007-2013) agreement n 257386 under grant

Contact information
Experiment contact information: Dimosthenis Kyriazis (dimos@mail.ntua.gr). The research leading to these results has received funding from the European Phone: +302107722546 Commission's Seventh Framework Programme (FP7/2007-2013)

Provided by the Foundation

under grant agreement n 257386 BonFIRE contact information: More information: www.bonfire-project.eu Contact: bonfire @ bonfire-project.eu