@article {Longo201737, title = {An approach for resiliency quantification of large scale systems}, journal = {Performance Evaluation Review}, volume = {44}, number = {4}, year = {2017}, note = {cited By 0}, pages = {37-48}, publisher = {Association for Computing Machinery}, abstract = {

We quantify the resiliency of large scale systems upon changes encountered beyond the normal system behavior. Formal definitions for resiliency and change are provided together with general steps for resiliency quantification and a set of resiliency metrics that can be used to quantify the effects of changes. A formalization of the approach is also shown in the form of a set of four algorithms that can be applied when large scale systems are modeled through stochastic analytic state space models (monolithic models or interacting sub-models). In particular, in the case of interacting submodels, since resiliency quantification involves understanding the transient behavior of the system, fixed-point variables evolve with time leading to non-homogenous Markov chains. At the best of our knowledge, this is the first paper facing this problem in a general way. The proposed approach is applied to an Infrastructure-As-A-Service (IaaS) Cloud use case. Specifically, we assess the impact of changes in demand and available capacity on the Cloud resiliency and we show that the approach proposed in this paper can scale for a real sized Cloud without significantly compromising the accuracy.

}, keywords = {Available capacity, Chains, Formal definition, Homogenous Markov chain, Infrastructure as a service (IaaS), Large scale systems, Markov processes, Non-homogeneous, Resiliency quantification, State - space models, State space methods, Stochastic models, Stochastic systems, Submodels, Transient behavior}, issn = {01635999}, doi = {10.1145/3092819.3092825}, url = {https://www.scopus.com/inward/record.uri?eid=2-s2.0-85019853222\&doi=10.1145\%2f3092819.3092825\&partnerID=40\&md5=6266fffb7aad937fefad706e31fcd7da}, author = {Francesco Longo and Rahul Ghosh and Vijay K. Naik and A.J. Rindos and Kishor Trivedi} } @proceedings {Ghosh2017227, title = {Resiliency quantification for large scale systems: An IaaS cloud use case}, journal = {ValueTools 2016 - 10th EAI International Conference on Performance Evaluation Methodologies and Tools}, year = {2016}, note = {cited By 0; Conference of 10th EAI International Conference on Performance Evaluation Methodologies and Tools, ValueTools 2016 ; Conference Date: 25 October 2016 Through 28 October 2016; Conference Code:127816}, pages = {227-234}, publisher = {Association for Computing Machinery}, address = {Taormina; Italy; 25-28 October 2016}, abstract = {

We quantify the resiliency of large scale systems upon changes encountered beyond the normal system behavior. General steps for resiliency quantification are shown and resiliency metrics are defined to quantify the effects of changes. The proposed approach is illustrated through an Infrastructureas-a-Service (IaaS) Cloud use case. Specifically, we assess the impact of changes in demand and available capacity on the Cloud resiliency using interacting state-space based submodels. Since resiliency quantification involves understanding the transient behavior of the system, fixed-point variables evolve with time leading to non-homogenous Markov chains. In this paper, we present an algorithm for resiliency analysis when dealing with such non-homogenous sub-models. A comparison is shown with our past research, where we quantified the resiliency of IaaS Cloud performance using a one level monolithic model. Numerical results show that the approach proposed in this paper can scale for a real sized Cloud without significantly compromising the accuracy. Copyright {\textcopyright} 2016 EAI.

}, keywords = {Available capacity, Chains, Clouds, Homogenous Markov chain, Impact of changes, Infrastructure as a service (IaaS), Large scale systems, Markov processes, Non-homogeneous, Numerical results, Resiliency, Submodels, Transient behavior}, isbn = {9781631901416}, doi = {10.4108/eai.25-10-2016.2266805}, url = {https://www.scopus.com/inward/record.uri?eid=2-s2.0-85021320622\&doi=10.4108\%2feai.25-10-2016.2266805\&partnerID=40\&md5=a6167b2554cad8a9aae02963254c8b52}, author = {Rahul Ghosh and Francesco Longo and Vijay K. Naik and A.J. Rindos and Kishor Trivedi} } @proceedings {Bruneo2015797, title = {Analytical Modeling of Reactive Autonomic Management Techniques in IaaS Clouds}, journal = {Proceedings - 2015 IEEE 8th International Conference on Cloud Computing, CLOUD 2015}, year = {2015}, note = {cited By 2; Conference of 8th IEEE International Conference on Cloud Computing, CLOUD 2015 ; Conference Date: 27 June 2015 Through 2 July 2015; Conference Code:116940}, pages = {797-804}, publisher = {Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers Inc.}, address = {New York (USA)}, abstract = {

Cloud computing infrastructures provide services to a wide number of users whose behavior can deeply change at the occurrence of particular events. To correctly handle such situations a cloud infrastructure have to be reconfigured in a way that does not cause degradation in the overall performance. Otherwise, the quality of service specified in the service level agreement could be violated. To prevent such situations, the infrastructure could be organized as an autonomic system where self-adaptation and self-configuration techniques are implemented. Appropriate design choices become important in order not to fail in this goal. We propose a technique, based on a Petri net model and a specific analytical analysis approach, to represent Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) systems in the case in which the load conditions can suddenly change and reactive autonomic management techniques are applied to mitigate the consequences of the change. The model we propose is able to appropriately evaluate performance metrics in such critical situations making it suitable as a design tool for IaaS cloud systems. {\textcopyright} 2015 IEEE.

}, keywords = {Autonomic management, cloud computing, Cloud computing infrastructures, Cloud infrastructures, Iaas clouds, Industrial management, Infrastructure as a service (IaaS), Performance metrics, Petri nets, Quality of service, Resiliency, Service Level Agreements, Stochastic reward nets, Stochastic systems}, isbn = {9781467372879}, doi = {10.1109/CLOUD.2015.110}, url = {https://www.scopus.com/inward/record.uri?eid=2-s2.0-84960155425\&doi=10.1109\%2fCLOUD.2015.110\&partnerID=40\&md5=2aa09923889aea0bc667deb1d6d250d8}, author = {Dario Bruneo and Francesco Longo and Rahul Ghosh and Marco Scarpa and Antonio Puliafito and Kishor Trivedi} } @article {Ghosh201457, title = {Scalable analytics for IaaS cloud availability}, journal = {IEEE Transactions on Cloud Computing - IEEE Computer Society}, volume = {2}, number = {1}, year = {2014}, note = {cited By 5}, pages = {57-70}, publisher = {Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers Inc.}, abstract = {

In a large Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) cloud, component failures are quite common. Such failures may lead to occasional system downtime and eventual violation of Service Level Agreements (SLAs) on the cloud service availability. The availability analysis of the underlying infrastructure is useful to the service provider to design a system capable of providing a defined SLA, as well as to evaluate the capabilities of an existing one. This paper presents a scalable, stochastic model-driven approach to quantify the availability of a large-scale IaaS cloud, where failures are typically dealt with through migration of physical machines among three pools: hot (running), warm (turned on, but not ready), and cold (turned off). Since monolithic models do not scale for large systems, we use an interacting Markov chain based approach to demonstrate the reduction in the complexity of analysis and the solution time. The three pools are modeled by interacting sub-models. Dependencies among them are resolved using fixed-point iteration, for which existence of a solution is proved. The analytic-numeric solutions obtained from the proposed approach and from the monolithic model are compared. We show that the errors introduced by interacting sub-models are insignificant and that our approach can handle very large size IaaS clouds. The simulative solution is also considered for the proposed model, and solution time of the methods are compared. {\textcopyright} 2014 IEEE.

}, keywords = {Availability, availability analysis, cloud computing, Downtime, Existence of a solutions, Infrastructure as a service (IaaS), Iterative methods, Lakes, Maintenance, Markov processes, Model driven approach, Numeric solutions, Service level agreement (SLAs), simulation, Stochastic models, Stochastic reward nets, Stochastic systems}, issn = {21687161}, doi = {10.1109/TCC.2014.2310737}, url = {http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?eid=2-s2.0-84906976356\&partnerID=40\&md5=a63dc67c92ef7620c8a3b33aca08348b}, author = {Rahul Ghosh and Francesco Longo and Flavio Frattini and Stefano Russo and Kishor S. Trivedi} } @article {Ghosh2014667, title = {Stochastic model driven capacity planning for an infrastructure-as-a-service cloud}, journal = {IEEE Transactions on Services Computing - IEEE Computer Society}, volume = {7}, number = {4}, year = {2014}, note = {cited By 1}, pages = {667-680}, publisher = {Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers}, abstract = {

From an enterprise perspective, one key motivation to transform the traditional IT management into Cloud is the cost reduction of the hosted services. In an Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) Cloud, virtual machine (VM) instances share the physical machines (PMs) in the provider{\textquoteright}s data center. With large number of PMs, providers can maintain low cost of service downtime at the expense of higher infrastructure and other operational costs (e.g., power consumption and cooling costs). Hence, determining the optimal PM capacity requirements that minimize the overall cost is of interest. In this paper, we show how a cost analysis and optimization framework can be developed using stochastic availability and performance models of an IaaS Cloud. Specifically, we study two cost minimization problems to address the capacity planning in an IaaS Cloud: 1) what is the optimal number of PMs that minimizes the total cost of ownership for a given downtime requirement set by service level agreements? and, 2) is it more economical to use cheaper but less reliable PMs or to use costlier but more reliable PMs for insuring the same availability characteristics? We use simulated annealing, a well-known stochastic search algorithm, to solve these optimization problems. Results from our analysis show that the optimal solutions are found within reasonable time. {\textcopyright} 2013 IEEE.

}, keywords = {Capacity planning, Capacity requirement, Clouds, Cost benefit analysis, Cost reduction, Downtime, Infrastructure as a service (IaaS), Maintenance, Optimization, Optimization framework, Optimization problems, Service Level Agreements, Simulated annealing, Stochastic models, Stochastic search algorithms, Stochastic systems, Total cost of ownership}, issn = {19391374}, doi = {10.1109/TSC.2013.44}, url = {http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?eid=2-s2.0-84919717849\&partnerID=40\&md5=34c70f14a9a3f838562335050a628985}, author = {Rahul Ghosh and Francesco Longo and Ruofan Xia and Vijay K. Naik and Kishor S. Trivedi} } @article {Ghosh20131216, title = {Modeling and performance analysis of large scale IaaS clouds}, journal = {Future Generation Computer Systems - Elsevier}, volume = {29}, number = {5}, year = {2013}, note = {cited By 10}, pages = {1216-1234}, abstract = {

For Cloud based services to support enterprise class production workloads, Mainframe like predictable performance is essential. However, the scale, complexity, and inherent resource sharing across workloads make the Cloud management for predictable performance difficult. As a first step towards designing Cloud based systems that achieve such performance and realize the service level objectives, we develop a scalable stochastic analytic model for performance quantification of Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) Cloud. Specifically, we model a class of IaaS Clouds that offer tiered services by configuring physical machines into three pools with different provisioning delay and power consumption characteristics. Performance behaviors in such IaaS Clouds are affected by a large set of parameters, e.g., workload, system characteristics and management policies. Thus, traditional analytic models for such systems tend to be intractable. To overcome this difficulty, we propose a multi-level interacting stochastic sub-models approach where the overall model solution is obtained iteratively over individual sub-model solutions. By comparing with a single-level monolithic model, we show that our approach is scalable, tractable, and yet retains high fidelity. Since the dependencies among the sub-models are resolved via fixed-point iteration, we prove the existence of a solution. Results from our analysis show the impact of workload and system characteristics on two performance measures: mean response delay and job rejection probability. {\textcopyright} 2012 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.

}, keywords = {Analytic modeling, Analytical models, Clouds, CTMC, Fixed-point iterations, IaaS, Infrastructure as a service (IaaS), Performance, Provisioning, Stochastic models, Stochastic systems, Submodels}, issn = {0167739X}, doi = {10.1016/j.future.2012.06.005}, url = {http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?eid=2-s2.0-84887062784\&partnerID=40\&md5=5aa7bb3aa9d27ba52b585a03501c8e18}, author = {Rahul Ghosh and Francesco Longo and Vijay K. Naik and Kishor S. Trivedi} }