Abstract: This paper presents the first version of the NIST Cloud Computing Reference Architecture (RA). This is a vendor neutral conceptual model that concentrates on the role and interactions of the identified actors in the cloud computing sphere. Five primary actors were identified - Cloud Service Consumer, Cloud Service Provider, Cloud Broker, Cloud Auditor and Cloud Carrier. Their roles and activities are discussed in this report. A primary goal for generating this model was to give the United States Government (USG) a method for understanding and communicating the components of a cloud computing system for Federal IT executives, Program Managers and IT procurement officials.

Abstract: When plugging an electric appliance into an outlet, we care neither how electric power is generated nor how it gets to that outlet. This is possible because electricity is virtualized; that is, it is readily available from a wall socket that hides power generation stations and a huge distribution grid. When extended to information technologies, this concept means delivering useful functions while hiding how their internals work. Computing itself, to be considered fully virtualized, must allow computers to be built from distributed components such as processing, storage, data, and software resources [1]. Technologies such as cluster, grid, and now, cloud computing, have all aimed at allowing access to large amounts of computing power in a fully virtualized manner, by aggregating resources and offering a single system view. In addition, an important aim of these technologies has been delivering computing as a utility. Utility computing describes a business model for on-demand delivery of computing power; consumers pay providers based on usage (“payas-you-go”), similar to the way in which we currently obtain services from traditional public utility services such as water, electricity, gas, and telephony. Cloud computing has been coined as an umbrella term to describe a category of sophisticated on-demand computing services initially offered by commercial providers, such as Amazon, Google, and Microsoft. It denotes a model on which a computing infrastructure is viewed as a “cloud,” from which businesses and individuals access applications from anywhere in the world on demand [2]. The main principle behind this model is offering computing, storage, and software “as a service.”

Abstract: From the leading minds in the field, Distributed and Cloud Computing is the first modern, up-to-date distributed systems textbook Starting with an overview of modern distributed models, the book exposes the design principles, systems architecture, and innovative applications of parallel, distributed, and cloud computing systems It will teach you how to create high-performance, scalable, reliable systems, providing comprehensive coverage of distributed and cloud computing, including: Facilitating management, debugging, migration, and disaster recovery through virtualization Clustered systems for research or ecommerce applications Designing systems as web services Social networking systems using peer-to-peer computing Principles of cloud computing using examples from open-source and commercial applications Using examples from open-source and commercial vendors, the text describes cloud-based systems for research, e-commerce, social networking and more Complete coverage of modern distributed computing technology including clusters, the grid, service-oriented architecture, massively parallel processors, peer-to-peer networking, and cloud computing Includes case studies from the leading distributed computing vendors: Amazon, Microsoft, Google, and more Designed to meet the needs of students taking a distributed systems course, each chapter includes exercises and further reading, with lecture slides and solutions available online

Abstract: Cloud computing presents a new model for IT service delivery and it typically involves over-a-network, on-demand, self-service access, which is dynamically scalable and elastic, utilising pools of often virtualized resources. Through these features, cloud computing has the potential to improve the way businesses and IT operate by offering fast start-up, flexibility, scalability and cost efficiency. Even though cloud computing provides compelling benefits and cost-effective options for IT hosting and expansion, new risks and opportunities for security exploits are introduced. Standards, policies and controls are therefore of the essence to assist management in protecting and safeguarding systems and data. Management should understand and analyse cloud computing risks in order to protect systems and data from security exploits. The focus of this paper is on mitigation for cloud computing security risks as a fundamental step towards ensuring secure cloud computing environments.

Abstract: In this paper, the authors focus on Cloud Computing, which is a distributed architecture that centralizes server resources on quite a scalable platform so as to provide on demand' computing resources and services The authors outline what cloud computing is, the various cloud deployment models and the main security risks and issues that are currently present within the cloud computing industry.

Abstract: The present disclosure relates to a distributed information storage system which functions as virtual cloud storage overlay on top of physical cloud storage systems. The disclosure discloses transparently solving all the data management related security, virtualization, reliability and enables transparent cloud storage migration, cloud storage virtualization, information dispersal and integration across disparate cloud storage devices operated by different providers or on-premise storage. The cloud storage is owned or hosted by same or different third-party providers who own the information contained in the storage which eliminates cloud dependencies. This present disclosure functions as a distributed cloud storage delivery platform enabling various functionalities like cloud storage virtualization, cloud storage integration, cloud storage management and cloud level RAID.

Abstract: Cloud computing provides cost-efficient opportunities for enterprises by offering a variety of dynamic, scalable, and shared services. Usually, cloud providers provide assurances by specifying technical and functional descriptions in Service Level Agreements (SLAs) for the services they offer. The descriptions in SLAs are not consistent among the cloud providers even though they offer services with similar functionality. Therefore, customers are not sure whether they can identify a trustworthy cloud provider only based on its SLA. To support the customers in reliably identifying trustworthy cloud providers, we propose a multi-faceted Trust Management (TM) system architecture for a cloud computing marketplace. This system provides means to identify the trustworthy cloud providers in terms of different attributes (e.g., security, performance, compliance) assessed by multiple sources and roots of trust information.

Abstract: A cloud services monitoring system (CSMS) helps a consumer of cloud computing resources determine the state of the cloud computing resources available to the consumer The CSMS is particularly effective for cloud models where the consumer of the cloud computing resources is not the same as the provider of the cloud resource The CSMS 102 also provides mechanisms for adjusting operations actions to preserve service guarantees for the consumer In that regard, the CSMS dynamically adjusts operations actions in response to the state of the cloud, rather than executing fixed predetermined operations actions that are not tailored to the monitored conditions

Abstract: Cloud Computing is a recent paradigm that is creating high expectations about benefits such as the pay-per-use model and elasticity of resources. However, with this optimism come also concerns about security. In a public cloud, the user's data storage and processing is no longer done inside its premises, but in data centers owned and administrated by the cloud provider. This may be a concern for organizations that deal with critical data, such as medical records. We show that a malicious insider can steal confidential data of the cloud user, so the user is mostly left with trusting the cloud provider. The paper achieves this goal by showing a set of attacks that demonstrate how a malicious insider can easily obtain passwords, cryptographic keys, files and other confidential data. Additionally, the paper shows that recent research results that might be useful to protect data in the cloud, are still not enough to deal with the problem. The paper is a call to arms for research in the topic.

Abstract: Cloud computing despite being in an early stage of adoption is becoming a popular choice for businesses to replace in-house IT infrastructure due to its technological advantages such as elastic computing and cost benefits resulting from pay-as-you-go pricing and economy of scale. These factors have led to a rapid increase in both the number of cloud vendors and services on offer. Given that cloud services could be characterized using multiple criteria (cost, pricing policy, performance etc.) it is important to have a methodology for selecting cloud services based on multiple criteria. Additionally, the end user requirements might map to different criteria of the cloud services. This diversity in services and the number of available options have complicated the process of service and vendor selection for prospective cloud users and there is a need for a comprehensive methodology for cloud service selection. The existing research literature in cloud service selection is mostly concerned with comparison between similar services based on cost or performance benchmarks. In this paper we discuss and formalize the issue of cloud service selection in general and propose a multi-criteria cloud service selection methodology.

Abstract: Availability of cloud systems is one of the main concerns of cloud computing. The term, availability of clouds, is mainly evaluated by ubiquity of information comparing with resource scaling. In clouds, load balancing, as a method, is applied across different data centers to ensure the network availability by minimizing use of computer hardware, software failures and mitigating recourse limitations. This work discusses the load balancing in cloud computing and then demonstrates a case study of system availability based on a typical Hospital Database Management solution.

Abstract: A system for managing allocation of resources based on service level agreements between application owners and cloud operators. Under some service level agreements, the cloud operator may have responsibility for managing allocation of resources to the software application and may manage the allocation such that the software application executes within an agreed performance level. Operating a cloud computing platform according to such a service level agreement may alleviate for the application owners the complexities of managing allocation of resources and may provide greater flexibility to cloud operators in managing their cloud computing platforms.

Abstract: The disclosure discloses a cloud service broker, a cloud computing method and a cloud system. The cloud service broker comprises: a cloud service publishing interface module, configured to subscribe to information of cloud computing services and/or resources provided by a plurality of cloud service providers; a cloud service consuming interface module, configured to provide a consuming interface for a cloud service requester to access the cloud service provider; a cloud service processing module, configured to process a cloud service consumer request of the cloud service requester; and a cloud service adapting module, configured to adapt or call, according to cloud service consumer request, cloud computing services and/or resources provided by the cloud service provider. With the disclosure, the effect of facilitating cloud service requesters to use cloud services provided by different cloud service providers is achieved. Furthermore, system resources are saved and the system efficiency is improved.

Abstract: The easiness of managing and configuring resources and the low cost needed for setup and maintaining Cloud services have made Cloud Computing widespread. Several commercial vendors now offer solutions based on Cloud architectures. More and more providers offer new different services every month, following their customers needs. Anyway, it is very hard to find a single provider which offers all services needed by end users. Furthermore, different vendors propose different architectures for their Cloud systems and usually these are not compatible. Very few efforts have been done in order to propose a unified standard for Cloud Computing. This is a problem, since different Cloud systems and vendors have different ways to describe and invoke their services, to specify requirements and to communicate. Hence a way to provide a common access to Cloud services and to discover and use required services in Cloud federations is appealing. mOSAIC project addresses these problems by defining a common ontology and it aims at developing an open-source platform that enables applications to negotiate Cloud services as requested by users. The main problem in defining the mOSAIC ontology is in the heterogeneity of terms used by Clouds vendors, and in the number of standards which refer to Cloud Systems with different terminology. In this work the mOSAIC Cloud Ontology is described. It has been built by analysing Cloud standards and proposals. The Ontology has been then refined by introducing individuals from real Cloud systems.

Abstract: Cloud Computing is increasingly becoming popular as many enterprise applications and data are moving into cloud platforms. However, a major barrier for cloud adoption is real and perceived lack of security. In this paper, we take a holistic view of cloud computing security - spanning across the possible issues and vulnerabilities connected with virtualization infrastructure, software platform, identity management and access control, data integrity, confidentiality and privacy, physical and process security aspects, and legal compliance in cloud. We present our findings from the points of view of a cloud service provider, cloud consumer, and third-party authorities such as Govt. We also discuss important research directions in cloud security in areas such as Trusted Computing, Information Centric Security and Privacy Preserving Models. Finally, we sketch a set of steps that can be used, at a high level, to assess security preparedness for a business application to be migrated to cloud.

Abstract: With the increasing popularity of cloud computing as a solution for building high-quality applications on distributed components, efficiently evaluating user-side quality of cloud components becomes an urgent and crucial research problem. However, invoking all the available cloud components from user-side for evaluation purpose is expensive and impractical. To address this critical challenge, we propose a neighborhood-based approach, called CloudPred, for collaborative and personalized quality prediction of cloud components. CloudPred is enhanced by feature modeling on both users and components. Our approach CloudPred requires no additional invocation of cloud components on behalf of the cloud application designers. The extensive experimental results show that CloudPred achieves higher QoS prediction accuracy than other competing methods. We also publicly release our large-scale QoS dataset for future related research in cloud computing.

Abstract: Cloud computing not only changes the way of obtaining computing resources (such as computers, infrastructures, data storage, and application services), but also changes the way of managing and delivering computing services, technologies, and solutions. Cloud computing leads an opportunity in offering testing as a service (TaaS) for SaaS and clouds. Meanwhile, it causes new issues, challenges and needs in software testing, particular in testing clouds and cloud-based applications. This paper provides a comprehensive tutorial on cloud testing and cloud-based application testing. It answers the common questions raised by engineers and managers, and it provides clear concepts, discusses the special objectives, features, requirements, and needs in cloud testing. It offers a clear comparative view between web-based software testing and cloud-based application testing. In addition, it examines the major issues, challenges, and needs in testing cloud-based software applications. Furthermore, it also summarizes and compares different commercial products and solutions supporting cloud testing as services.

Abstract: A system and method are disclosed for private cloud computing and for the development and deployment of cloud applications in the private cloud. The private cloud computing system and method of the present invention include as components at least a cloud controller, a cloud stack, Service Registry, and a cloud application builder.

Abstract: HPC applications are increasingly being used in academia and laboratories for scientific research and in industries for business and analytics. Cloud computing offers the benefits of virtualization, elasticity of resources and elimination of cluster setup cost and time to HPC applications users. However, poor network performance, performance variation and OS noise are some of the challenges for execution of HPC applications on Cloud. In this paper, we propose that Cloud can be viable platform for some HPC applications depending upon application characteristics such as communication volume and pattern and sensitivity to OS noise and scale. We present an evaluation of the performance and cost tradeoffs of HPC applications on a range of platforms varying from Cloud (with and without virtualization) to HPC-optimized cluster. Our results show that Cloud is viable platform for some applications, specifically, non communicationintensive applications such as embarrassingly parallel and tree-structured computations up to high processor count and for communication-intensive applications up to low processor count.

Abstract: Novel methods and systems are provided for integrating multi-vendor cloud computing operations and architectures by using service-oriented orchestration to create a vendor and platform agnostic cloud computing framework. This approach aggregates core cloud computing functions including service provisioning, automating work flows, and data and usage monitoring across integrated services, thereby improving a data center's ability to execute operations quickly, under standardized protocols and with consistent quality of service.

Abstract: Since the late 1980s the world is working towards connectivity and convergence. In the last three decades, the convergence of information resources has happened. However to achieve a true convergence the information assets have to be shared, used and executed fruitfully by the various gadgets which we use in our daily lives. Internet of Things is a concept which leverages on the power of networks to create ubiquitous sensor-actuator networks. With the advent of the cloud technologies, the concept of IOTs can be integrated with even the basic elements having limited computing power. This paper aims to evaluate the possibilities offered by integrating the two concepts of IOTs and Cloud Computing.

Abstract: With the development of parallel computing, distributed computing, grid computing, a new computing model appeared, called cloud computing. It aims to share data, calculations, and services transparently among users of a massive grid. It became a hot issue for its advantages such as “reduce costs”, “increase business flexibility” and/or “provide business continuity”. In this paper, we described what is cloud computing and took Google's cloud computing techniques as an example, summed up key techniques, such as data storage technology (Google File System), data management technology (BigTable), as well as programming model and task scheduling model (Map-Reduce), used in cloud computing, and then some example of cloud computing vendors were illustrated and compared.

Abstract: Cloud computing is combination of various computing entities, globally separated, but electronically connected. As the geography of computation is moving towards corporate server rooms, it bring more issues including security, such as virtualization security, distributed computing, application security, identity management, access control and authentication. However, strong user authentication is the paramount requirement for cloud computing that restrict illegal access of cloud server. In this regard, this paper proposes a strong user authentication framework for cloud computing, where user legitimacy is strongly verified before enter into the cloud. The proposed framework provides identity management, mutual authentication, session key establishment between the users and the cloud server. A user can change his/her password, whenever demanded. Furthermore, security analysis realizes the feasibility of the proposed framework for cloud computing and achieves efficiency.

Abstract: Cloud computing has been envisioned as the de-facto solution to the rising storage costs of IT Enterprises. With the high costs of data storage devices as well as the rapid rate at which data is being generated it proves costly for enterprises or individual users to frequently update their hardware. Apart from reduction in storage costs data outsourcing to the cloud also helps in reducing the maintenance. Cloud storage moves the user's data to large data centers, which are remotely located, on which user does not have any control. However, this unique feature of the cloud poses many new security challenges which need to be clearly understood and resolved. One of the important concerns that need to be addressed is to assure the customer of the integrity i.e. correctness of his data in the cloud. As the data is physically not accessible to the user the cloud should provide a way for the user to check if the integrity of his data is maintained or is compromised. In this paper we provide a scheme which gives a proof of data integrity in the cloud which the customer can employ to check the correctness of his data in the cloud. This proof can be agreed upon by both the cloud and the customer and can be incorporated in the Service level agreement (SLA). This scheme ensures that the storage at the client side is minimal which will be beneficial for thin clients.

Abstract: Cloud computing, despite its hype, is being widely deployed, with its dynamic scalability and usage of virtualized resources, in many organizations for several applications. It is envisioned that, in the near future, cloud computing will have a significant impact on the educational and learning environment, enabling their own users (i.e., learners, instructors, and administrators) to perform their tasks effectively with less cost by utilizing the available cloud-based applications offered by the cloud service providers. This paper discusses the use of cloud computing in the educational and learning arena, to be called “Education and Learning as a Service” (ELaaS), emphasizing its possible benefits and offerings. It is essential for an educational and learning organization, with its budget restrictions and sustainability challenges, to use the cloud formation best suited for a particular IT activity. The Jericho Forum proposes a cloud computing formation model, called the Cloud Cube Model (CCM), which is based on 4 criteria. To preserve the symmetry of the cube, a new cloud computing formation model, called the Complete Cloud Computing Formations (C3F), is proposed. The IT activities in the educational and learning organizations are then classified with respect to the two criteria: mission criticality and sensitivity. Each class is then mapped into the appropriate position in the C3F, creating ELaaS Quadrant. This essentially establishes a general conceptual framework for ELaaS.

Abstract: Based on the analysis and summary of the previous work,the cloud computing framework can be divided into three layers:core cloud services,cloud service management and user access interface.To realize low-cost,reliable,available and scalable cloud services,the up-to-date key technologies and research progresses of the three layers within the cloud framework are reviewed intensively and extensively.Regarding cloud infrastructure,the strategies for data cen-ter design and management are introduced together with the virtualization technology.In respect of large-scale data proc-essing,several platforms and their resource management and task scheduling mechanisms are investigated extensively.With regard to cloud service quality,both QoS guarantee and security/privacy protection are discussed in depth.The prospects for future research are further explored based on the new application models and limitations of cloud comput-ing.Finally,the cloud computing platform and research work of Southeast University are introduced.

Abstract: Cloud computing is becoming a powerful network architecture to perform large-scale and complex computing. In this paper, we will comprehensively survey the concepts and architecture of cloud computing, as well as its security and privacy issues. We will compare different cloud models, trust/reputation models and privacy-preservation schemes. Their pros and cons are discussed for each cloud computing security and architecture strategy.

Abstract: Service Level Agreements for Cloud Computing provides a unique combination of business-driven application scenarios and advanced research in the area of service-level agreements for Clouds and service-oriented infrastructures. Current state-of-the-art research findings are presented in this book, as well as business-ready solutions applicable to Cloud infrastructures or ERP (Enterprise Resource Planning) environments. Service Level Agreements for Cloud Computing contributes to the various levels of service-level management from the infrastructure over the software to the business layer, including horizontal aspects like service monitoring. This book provides readers with essential information on how to deploy and manage Cloud infrastructures. Case studies are presented at the end of most chapters. Service Level Agreements for Cloud Computing is designed as a reference book for high-end practitioners working in cloud computing, distributed systems and IT services. Advanced-level students focused on computer science will also find this book valuable as a secondary text book or reference.