CLOUD SYSTEMS LAB

Objective: Cloud systems lab explores that aspect of distributed systems research that is relevant to computing Clouds.

Current Focus: Quality of Service in Clouds – Defining and meeting user expectation from compute Clouds.

Clouds are emerging as computing platforms that use dynamic configuration of software and hardware. The motivation for adopting clouds is being able to use a service without owning it, and paying by usage rather than for ownership and maintenance. Enabling architectures for clouds are service oriented architectures including both the software and hardware. SaaS is coined to represent software as a service and deals with exposing software as a service utility that can be managed and monitored based on its usage. Similarly, PaaS refers to platform projected as a service. Application frameworks enable the PaaS model. And, IaaS refers to infrastructure as a service wherein the system hardware is projected as a service. Virtualization technologies give impetus to this kind of usage since they seamlessly support on-demand enabling of services with the required applications and their requisite platforms and hardware. Cloud models support multi-tenancy of applications so as to reuse the hardware and/or software across multiple clients. This improves resource utilization for the cloud provider and enables pay-for-use for the customer. Since clouds allow for multi-tenancy of applications over the same hardware, guaranteeing application performance will govern, to a large extent, the usage models of clouds. As clouds gain greater acceptance, user expectations from the clouds will start moving from best-effort service to guaranteed service. Hence, it is foreseen that quality of service (QoS) will be a dominant consideration for cloud adaptation. QoS has many facets and will depend on the aspect that is crucial for the user. Application specific performance, as response time or throughput, application security varying from data integration and consistency to privacy, service availability, etc., are some of the QoS considerations that clouds need to address. Here we explore the QoS features of different cloud architectures with a view to rationalize user expectation from them.


Broad Exploration Areas:

Virtualization Stack

Cloud Middleware

Semantic Application Provisioning

Fault Tolerance


Publications:

Journals and Book Chapters

Conferences Papers

Thesis

Technical Reports


Talks:

Technical Talks


Contributors:

Students

Interns

Project Assistants: Ramamani Narendrababu, May 2016

Funding sponsors: HP-India Labs, ANRC, Deity and KSRTC, Flipkart,  IBM-IRL, Accenture