Delivering IT as A Utility- A Systematic Review

2014

C OMPUTING is rapidly moving towards a model, where it is provided as services that are delivered in a manner similar to traditional utilities, such as water, electricity, gas, and telephony. In such a model, users access services according to their requirements, without regard to where the services are hosted or how they are delivered. Several computing architectures have evolved to realize this utility computing vision, including grid computing, service-oriented architecture (SOA), and cloud computing, which has recently shifted into the center of attention in the ICT industry. Increasing numbers of IT vendors are promising to offer applications, storage, and computation hosting services with conforming service-level agreements (SLA) to ensure quality of services (QoS) and performance [1]. Considering many of these services are hosted in traditional data centers, there is significant complexity involved in ensuring the scalability, availability, manageability and accessibility of applications, services, and data, as the scale of the systems as well as the users grows. As a result, it is becoming important to investigate the use of cloud computing techniques and its interoperability with utility computing. This special issue focuses on principles, paradigms, and applications of "utility computing" and its practical realization, especially in the context of cloud computing. Despite a wide body of research development effort, ensuring the communications of cyberspaces and real spaces, how to realize cloud and utility services remains an open challenge. This special issue is in response to the increasing convergence between cloud and utility technologies and services. While different approaches exist, challenges and opportunities are numerous in this context. The research papers selected for this special issue represent recent progress in the field, including works on cloud architectures, mobile computing, security and energy issues, services computing and modelling, resources management, virtualization technologies and applications. All of these papers not only provide novel ideas and state-of-the-art techniques in the field, but also stimulate future research in merging cloud and utility services.

IEEE Transactions on Cloud Computing, 2014

C OMPUTING is rapidly moving towards a model, where it is provided as services that are delivered in a manner similar to traditional utilities, such as water, electricity, gas, and telephony. In such a model, users access services according to their requirements, without regard to where the services are hosted or how they are delivered. Several computing architectures have evolved to realize this utility computing vision, including grid computing, service-oriented architecture (SOA), and cloud computing, which has recently shifted into the center of attention in the ICT industry. Increasing numbers of IT vendors are promising to offer applications, storage, and computation hosting services with conforming service-level agreements (SLA) to ensure quality of services (QoS) and performance [1]. Considering many of these services are hosted in traditional data centers, there is significant complexity involved in ensuring the scalability, availability, manageability and accessibility of applications, services, and data, as the scale of the systems as well as the users grows. As a result, it is becoming important to investigate the use of cloud computing techniques and its interoperability with utility computing. This special issue focuses on principles, paradigms, and applications of "utility computing" and its practical realization, especially in the context of cloud computing. Despite a wide body of research development effort, ensuring the communications of cyberspaces and real spaces, how to realize cloud and utility services remains an open challenge. This special issue is in response to the increasing convergence between cloud and utility technologies and services. While different approaches exist, challenges and opportunities are numerous in this context. The research papers selected for this special issue represent recent progress in the field, including works on cloud architectures, mobile computing, security and energy issues, services computing and modelling, resources management, virtualization technologies and applications. All of these papers not only provide novel ideas and state-of-the-art techniques in the field, but also stimulate future research in merging cloud and utility services.

15th IEEE International Workshops on Enabling Technologies: Infrastructure for Collaborative Enterprises (WETICE'06), 2006

Utility computing is a service provisioning model, which will provide adaptive, flexible and simple access to computing resources, enabling a pay-per-use model for computing similar to traditional utilities such as water or electricity. The deployment of a utility computing solution involves a full separation between the provider and the consumer. The consumer requires a uniform, secure and reliable functionality to access the utility computing service and the provider requires a scalable, flexible and adaptive infrastructure to provide the service. The solution should be based on standards and allow a gradual deployment in order to obtain a favourable response from the application developers and the information technology staff. Grid technology overcomes such challenges by means of its standard functionality for flexible integration of diverse distributed resources. This position paper proposes an innovative solution for utility computing which can be deployed on a Grid infrastructure based on Globus toolkit and Grid-Way components

2011

With the growing amount of computational resources available, not only locally (e.g. multicore processors), but also across the Internet, utility computing (aka Clouds and Grids) becomes more and more interesting as a means to outsource applications and services, respectively. So far, these systems still act like external resources / devices that have to be explicitly selected, integrated, accessed and so forth. In this paper, we present our conceptual approaches of dealing with increased capacity, scale and heterogeneity of future systems by integrating and using remote resources and services through a kind of web-based "fabric".

2005

The future of the Internet may be a conjunction of Grid computing and service overlays hosted over Next Generation Internet (NGI) technologies, consisting of both wireline and wireless networks. The Grid and overlay networks can be seen as a key service layer for the future where the combination of computing and communication resources is dynamically allocated to virtual organizations on demand to enable optimal service and business deployment. To enable this synergy the efficient allocation of resources at minimum cost needs to be enabled. Today our resource description, resource matching and pricing in Grid/NGI needs to be extended/addressed and our viewpoint on these aspects are introduced in this paper. Initially this paper looks at some of the drivers and business models that could be envisaged with some background on developing grid networks and a brief review of some recent work on QoS description.

Lecture Notes in Computer Science, 2007

Utility computing is a service provisioning model which will provide adaptive, flexible and simple access to computing resources, enabling a pay-per-use model for computing similar to traditional utilities such as water, gas or electricity. On the other hand, grid technology provides standard functionality for flexible integration of diverse distributed resources. This paper describes and evaluates an innovative solution for utility computing, based on grid federation, which can be easily deployed on any infrastructure based on the Globus Toolkit. This solution exhibits many advantages in terms of security, scalability and site autonomy, and achieves good performance, as shown by results, mainly with computeintensive applications.

… on high performance computing …, 2008

This keynote paper: presents a 21 st century vision of computing; identifies various computing paradigms promising to deliver the vision of computing utilities; defines Cloud computing and provides the architecture for creating market-oriented Clouds by leveraging technologies such as VMs; provides thoughts on market-based resource management strategies that encompass both customer-driven service management and computational risk management to sustain SLAoriented resource allocation; presents some representative Cloud platforms especially those developed in industries along with our current work towards realising market-oriented resource allocation of Clouds by leveraging the 3 rd generation Aneka enterprise Grid technology; reveals our early thoughts on interconnecting Clouds for dynamically creating an atmospheric computing environment along with pointers to future community research; and concludes with the need for convergence of competing IT paradigms for delivering our 21 st century vision.

IBM Systems Journal, 2000

2009

IBM Systems Journal, 2000

In this paper we describe a utility computing framework, consisting of a component model, a methodology, and a set of tools and common services for building utility computing systems. This framework facilitates the creation of new utility computing systems by providing a set of common functions, as well as a set of standard interfaces for those components that are specialized. It also provides a methodology and tools to assemble and re-use resource provisioning and management functions used to support new services with possibly different requirements. We demonstrate the benefits of the framework by describing two sample systems: a life-science utility computing service designed and implemented using the framework, and an on-line gaming utility computing service designed in compliance with the framework.