A Study on Analysis and Implementation of a Cloud Computing Framework for Multimedia Convergence Services

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1 A Study on Analysis and Implementation of a Cloud Computing Framework for Multimedia Convergence Services Ronnie D. Caytiles and Byungjoo Park * Department of Multimedia Engineering, Hannam University 133 Ojeong-dong, Daeduk-gu, Daejeon, Korea rdcaytiles@gmail.com, bjpark@hnu.kr * * Correspondent Author: Byungjoo Park * (bjpark@hnu.kr) Abstract The emergence of cloud computing brought a significant change for the delivery of how Information Technology to educational and business enterprises. In this paper, we discuss the different qualities of cloud computing frameworks together with the expectations and promises of cloud computing and associated benefits. The design of a cloud computing framework is presented and its components to realize the identified qualities. A successful cloud solution delivers the qualities of being flexible and has the ability to easily work with multiple programming and platform or run-time environments. Keywords: cloud computing, SLA, cloud broker 1. Introduction The significant change in how Information Technology is delivered to educational and business enterprises have been brought by the rapid emergence of Cloud Computing. IT infrastructures are now available for rent in a minimal fee instead of buying expensive hardware or software resources and incur excessive maintenance costs. The Cloud Computing infrastructure of a cloud solution ensures that critical business operations of enterprises must be performed with confidence of meeting deadlines. It must be flexible and open for critical QoS parameters that change over time, such as reliability, trust and security, time, and cost. A successful cloud solution delivers the qualities of being flexible and has the ability to easily work with multiple programming and platform or runtime environments. In this paper, we discuss the different qualities of cloud computing frameworks together with the expectations and promises of cloud computing and associated benefits. The design of a cloud computing framework is presented and its components to realize the identified qualities. The rest of this paper is organized as follows: Section 2 identifies the qualities of the cloud computing framework; Section 3 outlines the design of the cloud computing framework; and the concluding remarks in Section

2 2. Qualities of Cloud Computing Framework The use of computing resources (e.g., networks, servers, storage, applications, and services) that are rapidly provisioned and delivered (with a minimal cost) as a service over a network (i.e., Internet) is referred to as Cloud Computing [1, 7, 8, 9]. National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) [7] have specified five characteristics of cloud computing that describe and differentiate Cloud services from conventional computing approaches as shown in Figure 1: Figure 1. Cloud Computing Characteristics as defined by NIST [7] a. On-demand self-service involves customers using a web site or similar control panel interface to provision computing resources such as additional computers, network bandwidth or user accounts, without requiring human interaction between customers and the vendor. b. Broad network access enables customers to access computing resources over networks such as the Internet from a broad range of computing devices such as laptops and smartphones. c. Resource pooling involves vendors using shared computing resources to provide cloud services to multiple customers. Virtualization and multi-tenancy mechanisms are typically used to both segregate and protect each customer and their data from other customers, and to make it appear to customers that they are the only user of a shared computer or software application. d. Rapid elasticity enables the fast and automatic increase and decrease to the amount of available computer processing, storage and network bandwidth as required by customer demand. 220

3 e. Pay-per-use measured service involves customers only paying for the computing resources that they actually use, and being able to monitor their usage. This is analogous to household use of utilities such as electricity. Cloud services are often but not always utilized in conjunction with, and mainly enabled by, virtualization technologies [6, 7, 9]. Virtualization abstracts the physical infrastructure making it available as a soft component that is easier to utilize and manage. By increasing infrastructure utilization, it reduces cost and provides the agility required to speed up Information Technology processes. It is important for the Cloud computing framework to be flexible (has pluggable and extensible architectures), easily customizable, and extensible while being service oriented to provide unique SLA [5]/QoS & Web Services management, security and dynamic provisioning. This includes the ability to remotely control, monitor and dynamically change single and groups of nodes, which is not only important to simplify the management, but also to identify and remove bottlenecks. A good quality cloud computing platform also possesses the following qualities: Easy to deploy and manage. Demand based or contains dynamic provisioning based on QoS. Resource Sharing. It must have the ability to host multiple users and applications across same infrastructure. It can offer scalable services for handling increased workloads and potentially large infrastructures. Has the capability to distribute workloads. Contains failure management capability. SOA Service-based approach for infrastructure, workload management, and application submission. QoS Extensible set of parameters controlling the scheduling of workloads. Ability of dynamically change the value of these parameters in order to meet the continuously changing business needs of the enterprise. Leverage VM technology to dynamically assign resource shares according to service requirements. Can support customer-driven service management based on customer profiles and requested service requirements 3. Cloud Computing Framework Design The Cloud Computing framework needs to be easy to manage, provision, monitor, secure and change resources when needed or based on pre-determined service levels that match the applications. It must allow easy abstraction of underlying hardware and 221

4 provides an elastic architecture that provisions and de-provisions on demand based on QoS requirements. Figure 2 shows an overview of the cloud computing infrastructure. Figure 2. Cloud Computing Framework Design The Cloud broker as shown in Figure 2 provides effective managements of providing the Clients with information regarding how to use cloud computing to support business goals. It acts as the third-party module that serves as the intermediary between the Client of a cloud computing service and the providers of that service. The broker works with the customer to understand work processes, provisioning needs, budgeting and data management requirements. The broker presents the customer with a short list of recommended cloud providers and the customer contacts the vendor(s) of choice to arrange service. From the user s point of view, there are specific services that the cloud infrastructure must put in place to effectively take advantage of the ondemand provisioning of cloud computing resources as shown in Figure 2. These services are as follows: Session Management. This service is intended to manage users work sessions and activities. The user s access rights and privileges are specified on the schedule list during his/her registration. Security. This service assures security of acquiring services during sessions, by encrypting and decrypting data. Users are authenticated upon registration, and data are protected with cryptography techniques. User Interface. Plays the role of a medium between the user and the system. The Interface module intercepts the local users actions and sends them to the server via cloud through the interaction of Cloud Brokers. Scheduling. This service is the most important component wherein it provides the necessary tools to manage tasks and resources. List of the tasks is displayed in a table to the users with their related information (priority, starting time ). 222

5 From the provider point of view, the specific services the cloud infrastructure must put in place to effectively deliver the demand based market place as shown in Figure 2 are as follows: Virtualization. Virtual Machine technology allows workload isolation, server consolidation, multi-tenancy, fine grain tuning of allocated resources, and execution sandboxing. Moreover, virtual machine instances are started and stopped on-demand on a single physical machine to meet accepted service requests, hence providing maximum flexibility to configure various partitions of resources on the same physical machine to different specific requirements of service requests. SLA Scheduling. This service is responsible for ensuring that IT services are delivered with the desired QoS. This layer is a fundamental component and includes different operations such as resource and application metering, billing, accounting and market based scheduling [5]. Cloud Services. Cloud computing service offerings are broadly classified into three delivery models: the Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS); the Platform as a Service (PaaS); and the Software as a Service (SaaS) [3, 4, 6]. For SaaS, the service levels, security, governance, compliance, and liability expectations of the service are contractually stipulated, managed to, and enforced to the provider. For PaaS or IaaS, the consumer s system administrators has the responsibility to effectively manage this issues, with some offset expected by the provider for securing the underlying platform and infrastructure components to ensure basic service availability and security. It should be clear in either case that one can assign/transfer responsibility but not necessarily accountability for both consumers and providers. Resource Pool Management. Clouds tend to be composed by different resources, such as clusters, data-centers, workstations, and possibly Computing Grids. These resources are either virtual or physical. This requires uniform access and way of leveraging these resources. Dynamic Provisioning. Public Clouds address the need of integrating additional resources into the existing infrastructure during peak loads. SLA aware schedulers identify the additional resources (storage, compute, or other) required to meet the QoS requirements and resources are obtained by means of a market mediated negotiation with available providers. Infrastructure Management. This service provides the horse power required to execute the Cloud workload. Infrastructure providers maintain multiple datacenter that are maintained and made accessible through virtual infrastructure management software. 223

6 To further describe the cloud computing framework, the flow of activities is shown in Figure 3. Figure 3. Cloud Computing Framework Workflow In the figure, when requesting for a cloud service, 1. The client first provide details for the desired service, resource, and cloud provider to the Cloud Broker; 2. Then, the Cloud Broker compares each detail provided by the Client with the related data to the Cloud store (Cloud Services, Cloud Providers, and Cloud Resources); 3. Next, after getting matches, the Cloud Broker applies filtering. The result of the comparisons must be filtered to suit the SLA policies between the client and the Cloud provider. Services such as QoS assurance, metering or billing, security implementations, etc.; 4. Finally the results services required by Clients, are returned to the client. The SLA (service-level agreement) reached by the client and cloud service provider specifies attributes of services that form the client s request or workflow. It is a negotiated agreement between the Client and the Cloud provider. The policies, QoS, metering or pricing, are identified in the negotiation and records a common understanding about services, priorities, responsibilities, guarantees, and warranties. 224

7 4. Conclusions This paper has characterized the fundamental qualities of the Cloud Computing Framework that is from both the Client and Cloud Provider s point of view together with the expectations and promises of cloud computing and associated benefits. The design of a cloud computing framework is presented and its components to realize the identified qualities. Among the components, the Cloud Broker plays an important role by providing Clients with information about how to access cloud computing resources. All cloud computing transactions goes through the Cloud Broker and provides understanding for work processes, provisioning needs, budgeting and data management requirements. Services acquired by Clients is specified by the service-level agreement (SLA) reached by the Client and the Cloud Service Provider that entails service attributes. Acknowledgements This research was supported by Basic Science Research Program through the National Research Foundation of Korea (NRF) funded by the Ministry of Education, Science and Technology ( , , ). References [1] W. Jansen and T. Grance, Guidelines on Security and Privacy in Public Cloud Computing, NIST Special Publication , (2011) December. [2] [3] [4] [5] [6] Sun Microsystems, Inc., Introduction to Cloud Computing Architecture, White Paper, 1st Edition, (2009) June. [7] P. Mell and T. Grance, The NIST Definition of Cloud Computing, National Institute of Standards and Technology, Information Technology Laboratory, Version 15, (2009). [8] [9] S. Morrow, Data Security in the Cloud, Cloud Computing: Principles and Paradigms, Edited by Rajkumar Buyya, James Broberg and Andrzej Goscinski Copyright 2011 John Wiley & Sons, Inc., (2011) pp

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