1st European Workshop on Dependable Cloud Computing

EWDCC 2012

In conjunction with 9th European Dependable Computing Conference - EDCC 2012

May 8th, 2012

Sibiu, Romania

http://ewdcc12.di.fc.ul.pt/

OVERVIEW

With the increasing variety of cloud offerings, ranging from very basic infrastructure services, such as storage and virtual machines, to more complex platform services (e.g., providing database-like functionality), to end-user directed solutions such as web-based office tools, there is an ongoing trend to outsource all kinds of applications to the cloud.

However, recent studies on cloud offerings and hardware in general show that clouds are less reliable than traditional data centers, and hardware faults are more common than previously assumed. Moreover, the very fact that cloud services need to be accessed remotely, through the Internet, make their perceived availability directly dependent from the availability of the communication between clients and providers. In combination, this basically inhibits the outsourcing of critical applications (e.g., financial or medical services) to the cloud.

Besides that, recent failure events on big cloud providers such as Amazon raised an alert about the dangers of running critical applications on such third party infrastructures.

The 1st EWDCC workshop aims to provide a platform for discussion and dissemination of early-stage recent research efforts that explicitly aim at supporting dependability in the context of cloud computing. We expect the workshop to foster discussion between researchers from both industry and academia.

 

WORKSHOP PROGRAM

The workshop will be composed by two keynotes, two papers (selected among nine submissions) and five cloud-related EU-funded project presentations. The workshop program is also available on EDCC’12 program booklet.

·         9:00hs Keynote: The Cosca PaaS platform: on the way to flexible and dependable cloud computing. Franz Hauck (Institute of Distributed Systems, University of Ulm, Germany)

This talk will address our current research projects around cloud computing. The focus is on COSCA an OSGi-inspired PaaS system that allows applications to be composed from components. These can be individually updated and deployed similar to bundles in OSGi. COSCA further supports sockets for arbitrary communication. It is able to combine them with elasticity as known from typical PaaS systems. In the second part of the talk, we will address dependability issues in this context and how we plan to connect them to COSCA. We will present multiple building blocks for fault-tolerant applications that were developed within COSCA's predecessor projects and are ready to be integrated.

·         10:00hs Bridging the security drawbacks of virtualized network resource provisioning model. Ayush Sharma, Volker Fusenig, Ingmar Schen (Fraunhofer, Germany), Anand Kannan (KTH, Sweden)

 

·         10:30-11:00hs Coffee Break

 

·         11:00hs Securing Cloud-based Computations against Malicious Providers. Adil Bouti, Jorg Keller (FernUniversitat in Hagen)

·         11:30hs How to build a reliable mOSAIC of multiple Cloud services Dana Petcu, West University of Timisoara and Institute e-Austria Timisoara, Romania

The usage of the infrastructure services of multiple Clouds, either to easily migrate an application from one Cloud to another, or to benefit from the special facilities of particular Clouds,  requires to reach a certain level of application portability and technology independence, which are currently hardly reachable in the absence of well established standards. One approach is  to consider a new set of APIs,  offering a level of abstraction that ensure the vendor agnosticity, to follow the main idea of PaaSs, releasing the application developer from the burden of remote infrastructure settings, and to develop an open-source alternative to the existing PaaSs, allowing the usage of services from multiple providers of IaaSs. mOSAIC (Open-source API and Platform for multiple Clouds)  proves the viability of this approach through its recent software releases and initial test results. Beyond the particular approach for portability, special features to be reveled in the workshop presentation  are related to fault-tolerance at application components level, programmable elasticity of the components, and the reasons for an event-driven architecture and asynchronous communications.

·         12:00hs Elastic, scalable and self-tuning data replication in the Cloud-TM platform Paolo Romano (INESC-ID/IST, Portugal)

Cloud-TM is a recent EU project focused on the development of an innovative data-centric platform for the cloud. Cloud-TM leverages on efficient in-memory data replication mechanisms and on pervarsive self-tuning techniques aimed at maximizing efficiency in presence of fluctuations of the incoming workload as well as of elastic re-sizing of the underlying infrastructure. This talk will overview some recent results achieved by the Cloud-TM project in the area of transactional data replication, focusing on the issues of elasticity, consistency, scalability and self-tuning.

·         12:30-14:00hs Lunch

 

·         14:00hs TClouds, Trustworthy Clouds Marcelo Pasin (University of Lisbon, Portugal)

 

TClouds is an integrated research project funded by the FP7, focused on privacy protection in cross-border cloud infrastructures and on ensuring resilience against failures and attacks, while preserving scalability and cost-efficiency. It addresses legal and business implications, to contribute to create regulations for privacy-enhanced clouds. It also defines an architecture with enhancements for securing commodity clouds and provides secure and resilient middleware using single and multiple of clouds. A prototype involving critical IT-systems is under construction, including a city lighting system with increased resilience and fault tolerance, and a patient-centric home healthcare service that preserves privacy. The talk presents the project goals and structure, and focuses on the trustworthy architecture defined within the project and some cloud-of-clouds enhancements.

 

·         14:30hs Contrail: A reliable and trustworthy cloud platform for critical applications Roberto Cascella (INRIA, France)

 

Guaranteeing reliability in cloud computing is both a challenging task and an important feature to make the cloud trustful to run business applications. The support of dependability calls for ensuring the availability of the computation resources and for strict guarantees in terms of quality of service (QoS ) and protection (QoP) so that users and organizations can rely on cloud computing for their critical applications. Contrail develops an integrated approach to virtualization, offering Infrastructure as a Service services (IaaS), services for federating IaaS clouds and Contrail Platform as a Service services (ConPaaS) on top of federated clouds. Contrail technology deploys ConPaaS services which are self-managed, elastic and scalable, and the reliable cloud file system GAFS. One of the primary objectives of Contrail is to offer performance (QoS) and security (QoP) guarantees via SLA enforcement, data location awareness, and a scalable management of the computing resources via an interoperable Federation. The first public release of the Contrail system is forthcoming. In this talk I will highlight how the results of the Contrail project could support dependability and the development of trusted and realiable applications.

 

·         15:00hs Addressing Dependability Issues in Storage Clouds: The VISION Cloud approach Dimosthenis Kyriazis (National Technical University of Athens, Greece)

 

"It's become the phrase du jour" according to the Gartner senior analyst Ben Pring. Cloud computing offers the potential to dramatically reduce the cost of software services through the commoditization of IT assets and the efficient adaptation of resource provisioning according to the  dynamic on-demand usage patterns of Internet users. While current offerings implement principles such as agility, scalability, elasticity, rapid self-service provisioning and resources virtualization, key issues related to dependability have not yet been tackled. The latter is of major importance for storage clouds, considering the enormous amount of data being produced in today's rich digital environment (e.g. by smart phones, social networks, sensors, user generated content, etc). VISION Cloud aims at providing a flexible cloud environment addressing the challenge of providing data-intensive storage cloud services through raising the abstraction level of storage, enabling data mobility across providers, allowing computational and content-centric access to storage and deploying new data-oriented mechanisms for Quality of Service and security guarantees. The presentation will focus on the VISION Cloud approaches with respect to dependability issues (e.g. durability and availability of the environment), which are being considered during the full lifecycle of data-intensive services. Specific mechanisms will be discussed (e.g. a resiliency manager that automatically restores the proper resiliency for storage objects in the storage cloud despite failures) aiming at the provision of quality guarantees for the cloud services.

 

·         15:30-16:00hs Coffee Break

 

·         16:00hs Keynote: Software Execution Protection in the Cloud. Miguel Correia (INESC-ID/IST, Portugal)

 

Most cloud computing services execute software on behalf of their users. Many war stories and several studies suggest that such software execution is threatened by accidental arbitrary faults and malicious insiders. We present two lines of work to protect software execution in the cloud. The first replicates tasks to protect MapReduce executions from the effects of accidental arbitrary faults. The second uses hardware-based security to protect software execution from malicious insiders.

 

·         17:00hs Workshop closing

 

WORKSHOP TOPICS

The workshop welcomes submissions on all aspects of dependability in cloud computing, data center architectures, scalable systems and virtualization technology. Some of the topics of interest are:

 

·         Virtualization-based mechanism for tolerating faults and intrusions

·         Dependability issues in virtualization technology

·         Scalability issues in dependable systems

·         Security and privacy in the Cloud

·         Data center dependability issues

·         Disaster recovery for cloud-based and Internet-scale systems

·         Cloud dependability metrics, models, studies and benchmarks

·         Large scale problem diagnosis and recovery

·         Intrusion detection and tolerance in cloud environment

·         Service-oriented architectures dependability

·         Dependability issues in "cloud programming models" such as MapReduce

·         Service Level Agreement (SLA) and Quality of Service in the cloud

 

More information about the workshop can be obtained by emailing to ewdcc12_AT_di.fc.ul.pt.

 

SUBMISSION INSTRUCTIONS

The workshop will accept two formats of papers: regular papers (maximum 6 pages) and position papers (maximum 2 pages). Position papers allow researchers to present more speculative/futuristic ideas to stimulate discussion and further work. All papers will be published at the ACM digital library and thus have to adhere ACM 8.5”x11” two-column camera-ready format. The LaTeX and Word templates can be found here.

Each paper should be submitted as a single PDF file through the submission website: https://www.easychair.org/account/signin.cgi?conf=ewdcc2012.

At least one author of an accepted paper must register at the conference and present the paper at the workshop.

 

BEST PAPER

Besides the publication of the workshop proceedings at the ACM digital library, the authors of the best papers of the workshop will be invited to submit a revised (and maybe extended) version of the papers to SIGOPS Operating System Review (http://www.sigops.org/osr.html).

 

IMPORTANT DATES

(EXTENDED) Submission deadline: February 2, 2012

Author notification: March 14, 2012

Final version: March 20, 2012

 

WORKSHOP ORGANIZERS

Alysson Bessani, University of Lisbon, Portugal
Rüdiger Kapitza, TU Braunschweig, Germany

 

PROGRAM COMMITTEE

Christian Cachin, IBM Zurich, Swiss

Brendan Cully, University of British Columbia, Canada

Sameh Elnikety, Microsoft Research, USA

Ilir Gashi, City University London, UK

Henrique Moniz, Microsoft Research, UK

Kaustubh Joshi, AT&T Labs Research, USA

José Orlando Pereira, Univesity of Minho, Portugal

Marcelo Pasin, University of Lisbon, Portugal

Dana Petcu, Western University of Timisoara, Romania

Peter Pietzuch, Imperial College London, UK

Hans P. Reiser, University of Passau, Germany

Matthias Schunter, IBM Zurich, Swiss

Marco Serafini, Yahoo! Research Barcelona, Spain

Johan Tordsson, Umeå Universitet, Sweden

José Luis Vázquez-Poletti, Complutense University of Madrid, Spain

Marco Vukolic, Eurecom, France

 

SPONSORS

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