Cloud Computing

A lot of research is happening in and around the field of cloud computing in order to achieve more efficient solutions to different issues and to gain optimal results from them. This section introduces a few, among many, hot research topics related to the wide domain of cloud computing.

OPTIMAL MANAGEMENT OF CLOUD RESOURCE

Resource management in cloud computing is the prime responsibility of the IaaS cloud service providers who build and manage the data centers. IaaS cloud provider has two major resource management objectives. First, to make the environment reliable as well as robust for optimal and efficient utilization of the data center infrastructure. The second is related to the SLA, which defines the relation with the consumer party.

The first objective deals with issues like load balancing, fault tolerance, energy conservation etc. Here, the load should be distributed in a way that in a data center, the utilization rate remains in balance among resources of a similar type. To make a system fault tolerant, the allocation of the resources should happen in a way that the effect of the failure of some resource component remains insignificant. Energy conservation is another important issue while managing resources at a data center. Optimal energy use reduces computing cost and it should also be minimized to reduce the carbon footprint.

A cloud provider may opt for a number of approaches to handle these issues. It can optimize these parameters by taking a combined approach, or it can work on every metric individually. The cloud provider may use some consistent set of combinations and/or may also decide to employ varied performance goals for individual operational situations. For instance, energy minimization may be a higher priority during low-load conditions, while the service performance may be the higher priority during high load. A balance should be maintained among all these choices without affecting the user expectations. Finding out an optimal balancing point between performance and energy conservation is a critical concern of the research in such cases.

For resource management objectives related to the Service Level Agreements (SLA), the cloud providers generally adopt an approach called service differentiation. In this approach, different levels of service performances are delivered to different consumers depending on the service level agreements made with them.