IEEE CLOUD 2010 Conference, Day 4

Interesting presentations from Day 4:

Keynote: Securing data n the cloud – challenges and research directions by Prof. Elisa Bertino (Purdue University)
Presented an overview of the security challenges in cloud computing, she mentioned that some of the issues are simply about people’s perceptions of security and CC providers should act to improve people’s perceptions of security in the cloud – technical improvements can help but most issues are centered on who has control over data and servers.

Cost-Optimal Scheduling in Hybrid IaaS Clouds for Deadline Constrained Workloads (CLOUD2010-3029)
Ruben Van den Bossche, Kurt Vanmechelen, and Jan Broeckhove(Universiteit Antwerpen Antwerp, Belgium)
Kurt talked about reducing the costs of running applications on a mixture of in-house infrastructure and third party IaaS, this work was based on simulating job inputs that had deadlines and required certain resources (e.g CPU, memory), and aiming to reduce the costs of completing the jobs using the in-house infrastructure and hypothetical third party IaaS providers.

Reducing Costs of Spot Instances via Checkpointing in the Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (CLOUD2010-3030) Sangho Yi, Derrick Kondo, and Artur Andrzejak (INRIA Grenoble Rhône-Alpes, France; Zuse Institute Berlin (ZIB), Germany)
Here’s the abstract – it was an interesting bit of work but I didn’t quite understand how significant the cost reductions were as the graphs only showed a $2 or $3 improvement - maybe this was per hour so over time it would add up and be significant: Recently introduced spot instances in the Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) offer lower resource costs in exchange for reduced reliability: these instances can be revoked abruptly due to price and demand fluctuations. Mechanisms and tools that deal with the cost-reliability trade-offs under this schema are of great value for users seeking to lessen their costs while keeping reliability at a high level. We study how one such a mechanism, namely checkpointing, can be used to minimize the cost and volatility of resource provisioning. Based on the real price history of the spot instances we compare several adaptive checkpointing schemes in terms of monetary costs and improvement of job completion times. A trace-based simulation shows that our approach can reduce significantly both the price and the task completion time.

Open Source Cloud Computing Tools: A Case Study with a Weather Application (CLOUD2010-3056) Manuel Rodriguez-Martinez, Jaime Seguel, and Melvin Greer(University of Puerto Rico, Mayagüez; Lockheed Martin)
This was an interesting evaluation of Eucalyptus/Hadoop/Django for processing weather data, they had the same painful experience of installing Eucalyptus as we did.

Cloud Migration: A Case Study of Migrating an Enterprise IT System to IaaS (CLOUD2010-3057)
Ali Khajeh-Hosseini, David Greenwood, and Ian Sommerville (University of St Andrews, UK)
My talk was after the above presentation, it went really well and there was plenty of time for a good question and answer session as the previous presentations finished early. There was a lot of interest from industry folk who agreed that the socio-technical issues around cloud adoption are certainly important and need to be further explored.

An Evaluation of Distributed Datastores Using the AppScale Cloud Platform (CLOUD2010-3039)
Chris Bunch, Navraj Chohan, Chandra Krintz, Jovan Chohan, Jonathan Kupferman, Puneet Lakhina, Yiming Li, Yoshihide Nomura(University of California, USA; Fujitsu Labs Ltd., Japan)
Navraj gave a really good overview of the AppScale open source project, which tries to achieve a similar goal to the Eucalyptus project in giving the community a free platform that they can use and experiment with. If you haven’t already seen this project, google it, it’s worth a visit.