Towards autonomic management for Cloud services based upon volunteered resources

  • Authors:

  • Simon Caton;Omer Rana

  • Affiliations:

  • Institute for Information Systems and Management, Karlsruhe Institute of Technology, Englerstr. 14, 76131 Karlsruhe, Germany;School of Computer Science, Cardiff University, 5 The Parade, Roath, Cardiff CF24 3AA, U.K.

  • Venue:
  • Concurrency and Computation: Practice & Experience
  • Year:
  • 2012

  • Editorial

    Concurrency and Computation: Practice & Experience

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Abstract

Many research institutions and Universities own computational capacity that is not effectively utilized, thereby providing an opportunity for such institutions to use such capacity to offer Cloud services (to both internal and external users). However, the unreliability and unpredictability of these resources mean that their use in the context of a Service Level Agreement (SLA) is high risk, leading to a reduction in reputation as well as economic penalties in case of SLA violation. We propose a methodology that addresses the issues of unreliability and unpredictability such that Cloud software services could be hosted upon volunteered resources. To enable the harnessing of these resources we rely on autonomic fault management techniques that allow such systems to independently adapt the resources they use based upon their perception of individual resource reliability. Using our approach we were able to scale out the backend infrastructure of the Cloud service elastically (min 30thinspaces per worker), opportunistically and autonomically. We address two key questions in this article: can a campus volunteer infrastructure be used in Cloud provisioning? What measures are necessary in order to ensure reliability at the resource level? Copyright © 2011 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.