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Report

Teaser, summary, work performed and final results

Periodic Reporting for period 1 - CloudPerfect (Enabling CLoud Orchestration, Performance and Cost Efficiency Tools for QoE Enhancement and Provider Ranking)

Teaser

Summary

Cloud computing has become an integral part of IT and will evolve into an equally integral part of IT strategies; however, there are still several challenges that hinder the adoption of cloud by several of its potential customers. Among these challenges, CloudPerfect mainly focuses on: application and infrastructure management, performance awareness/assurance, SLA compliance validation and optimized provider selection. The aim is to produce a set of tools that will enable: 1) Cloud IaaS providers to enhance the stability and performance effectiveness of their infrastructures, 2) Cloud adopters in finding the best cloud infrastructure for their service and 3) a third party consulting entity to support both adopters and providers in taking care of the complexity of selecting, comparing and monitoring the performance of each cloud.

How does CloudPerfect support Cloud IaaS providers?
CloudPerfect develops the IaaS Provider Toolkit which improves resource utilisation within the cloud provider infrastructure by identifying the most suitable nodes for supporting deployment and configuration of the application(s). It offers cloud providers a way to model different application categories usage patterns as well as to predict the effect of certain categoriesâ€™ groups, when scheduled on nearby resources, enabling the ability to better control the behaviour of the offered services. Furthermore, CloudPerfect applies black box profiling and dynamic categorization of hosted applications, in order to map customers running instances to the predefined application categories, thus giving insight to the provider, so that consolidation with minimized overheads can be performed. By using CloudPerfect, IaaS providers will obtain higher consistency in performance ratings, less fluctuation on the monitored metrics and become more attractive to cloud users. The toolkit aims mainly at IaaS providers who have a very heterogeneous offering in terms of both the infrastructure, as well as the services and images they support.

How does CloudPerfect support Cloud Adopters?
CloudPerfect develops the Cloud Adopter Toolkit and Quality of Experience Toolkit (QoE Toolkit) which aim at supporting Cloud Adopters in choosing the best cloud infrastructure for their service(s) and helps them deploy, configure and monitor them accordingly. The solution proposed by CloudPerfect performs benchmarks of various IaaS Providers and compares them according to performance and cost parameters. It automates (a) application resource requirements identification prior to deployment, (b) extraction of suggestions regarding the best placement of an application on cloud and (c) application deployment processes even in multi-cloud setups. Regarding the need for effective monitoring of the quality of service, the solution proposed by CloudPerfect offers support for SLA-based performance monitoring and the automated triggering of alerts in case of SLA violation. At the same time, the uptake of corrective actions towards the maintenance of the IaaS Adopterâ€™s SLA will be simplified by the automated extraction of suggestions regarding the best placement of an application on cloud even during runtime along with the automated application re-deployment even in multi-cloud setups.
In CloudPerfect project it is envisaged that the Cloud Adopter Toolkit and QoE Tools may be used by a third consultancy party taking care, on behalf of the Cloud Adopter of the complexity of selecting, comparing and monitoring the cloud services.

Work performed

During the first year of the project, the Consortium collected and analysed requirements, investigated and reviewed the state of the art and specified the first version of the overall architecture for CloudPerfect.
The core tools were advanced and developments were made to address the requirements identified from both market and stakeholder side, as well as implicitly from the technological side. Furthermore integration of the individual tools to form toolkits that directly target the use case scenarios was performed.
The first iteration of the project experimentation took place which gave the Consortium the opportunity to collect and analyse a first set of KPIs and produce recommendations for the second year of the project.
The project also worked on the identification of a visual identity and on the analysis of the project results and potential customers in order to generate the right messages for the targeted audiences. A first set of communication tools was prepared and activities were performed aiming at generating awareness and knowledge around CloudPerfect.
Initial Business Models for CloudPerfect Toolkits were identified, single exploitable items were analysed and exploitation plans identified in order to guarantee the sustainability of the results after the project end.
CloudPerfect Consortium also actively participated in relevant standardization-collaboration activities representing project results and monitored and applied existing standards in the projectâ€™s software developments.

Final results

CloudPerfectâ€™s scope lies within in the core of strengthening innovation capacity and developing innovations that meet the need of European and Global cloud markets. CloudPerfect defines innovative, process and tools for enabling IaaS offerings to become more stable and offer qualitative performance features that address the needs of dynamic, multitenant and agnostic environments with limited knowledge exchange between the involved entities (providers and consumers), due to the existence of entity separation between IaaS and SaaS providers.
Furthermore, CloudPerfect enables the extension of the Broker role in Cloud environments as a mean to evaluate provider performance, both in terms of benchmarking actual services in a variety of application categories and in terms of the monitoring and validation of the issued Service Level Agreements. Thus they may act as a centralized ranking and data aggregating point for provider selection based on specific criteria. This aspect except for enhancing QoE of the end users may also improve and optimize cost management and billing strategies of SaaS providers, by selecting the optimal offering in terms of performance and cost trade-off per user.
CloudPerfect plans on releasing the key outcomes as Open Source, so that they can serve as precursors for other future evaluation schemes. This provides an opportunity for cloud brokerage experts and providers to incorporate new tools and capabilities into their service portfolio, in agreement with the CloudPerfect license. The technical and scientific reports being produced are made available in open-access repositories.
The proposed outcomes result on several innovations to existent related and new standards, especially with contributions to ISO (and the upcoming 19086-2 DIS standard on SLA metrics in which the CloudPerfect partners are actively contributing). The potential of the specific impact is showcased through two carefully selected use cases which CloudPerfect is executing to demonstrate real life operation. These use cases aim also at demonstrating the ability of Clouds to be extended to areas that are currently considered more traditional HPC infrastructures and are met through private infrastructures.