Special Issue on
Resource Orchestration for Cloud Computing
Guest Editors: Rajiv Ranjan, Rajkumar Buyya, Surya Nepal, and Dimitrios Georgakopoulos
Concurrency and Computation: Practice and Experience
Editor-in-Chief: Geoffrey C. Fox
*** Call for Papers ***
The emergence of cloud computing over the past five years is potentially one of the breakthrough advances in the history of computing. Cloud computing paradigm is shifting computing from physical hardware- and locally managed software-enabled platforms to virtualized Cloud-hosted services. Cloud computing assembles large networks of virtualized services: hardware services (compute services, storage, and network) and infrastructure services (e.g., web server, databases, message queuing systems, monitoring systems, etc.). Cloud providers including Amazon Web Services (AWS), Microsoft Azure, Rackspace, GoGrid, and others give users the option to deploy their application over a pool of virtually infinite resources with practically no capital investment and with modest operating cost proportional to the actual use. Elasticity, cost benefits, and abundance of resources motivate many organizations to migrate their enterprise applications to Clouds.
All predictions agree that cloud computing will be worth billions of dollars in new investments. A recently conducted survey by Gartner research indicates that cloud computing would be $150 billion business by 2014, and according to AMI partners, Small and Medium Enterprises (SMEs) are expected to spend over $100 billion on cloud computing by 2014. IDC recently forecasted that spending on public cloud hosted applications (excluding private cloud hosting) will grow from $16.5 billion in 2009 – a modest, recession-influenced last year’s forecast – to over $55 billion in 2014” (27% p.a. growth). Organizations are flocking to the cloud to benefit from the elasticity, self-service, resource abundance, ubiquity, responsiveness and cost efficiencies that it offers. Indeed, it is no surprise that cloud computing has already gained significant adoption by several organizations including SMEs, universities, and governments.
This special issue solicits papers that advance the fundamental understanding, technologies, and concepts related to orchestration of cloud-based hardware (CPU, storage, and network) and software resources (databases, load-balancers, message queuing systems, etc.). Resource orchestration process spans across range of operations, from selection, assembly, and deployment of hardware and software resources to monitoring their run-time performance statistics (e.g. load, availability, throughput, utilization, etc.) for ensuring consistency and adaptive management. With orchestration, the overall goal is to ensure successful hosting and delivery of applications by meeting the Quality of Service (QoS) objectives of application administrators. QoS is composed of number of functional and non-functional attributes such as performance statistics, security assurance, reliability, renting cost, scalability, availability, legal and regulatory concerns.
Migrating applications to clouds and integrating cloud resources into existing computing infrastructure is nontrivial. It leads to new challenges that often require innovation of paradigms and practices at all levels: technical, cultural, legal, regulatory and social. It requires administrators to consider a number of design time and run-time resource orchestration complexities. The cloud resource orchestration problem is multi-disciplinary in nature. The scope and significance of the problem calls for collaboration across various computing disciplines. From a service engineering perspective, resource selection methods have not kept pace with the rapid emergence of multiple-layer cloud resources (e.g., infrastructure, platform, and software). Current orchestration approaches are rarely transparent and adaptive. To select and deploy cloud resources requires human familiarity with the various providers and extensive manual programming. The interaction with resources is mainly performed through low-level APIs and command line interfaces. This is inadequate, given the proliferation of new providers offering resources at different levels. From a resource allocation perspective, designing an application-hosting infrastructure that copes with the inherent variation in end-user workload patterns and the uncertainty of cloud environments remains a very challenging problem.
Topics
Areas of interest for this special issue include the following:
- Simplified cloud resource representation and query models
- Policy-driven software resource composition and selection
- Policy-driven hardware resource selection
- Declarative resource orchestration systems
- Stochastic fault-tolerance and reliability models
- Statistical application and resource performance modeler
- Application-level health monitoring and QoS fulfillment
- End-to-end comprehensive QoS monitoring systems
- Software-based resource orchestration frameworks
- Innovative Scientific, Enterprise, and Social media Applications
- Security, privacy and trust issues in orchestrating resources
Schedule
Submission due date: October15, 2012
Notification of acceptance: Jan 15, 2013
Submission of final manuscript: March 15, 2013
Publication date: 3rd Quarter, 2013 (Tentative)
Submission & Major Guidelines
The special issue invites original research papers that make significant contributions to the state-of-the-art in “Recent Advances in Resource Orchestration Techniques for Cloud Computing Environments”. The papers must not have been previously published or submitted for journal or conference publications. However, the papers that have been previously published with reputed conferences could be considered for publication in the special issue if they are substantially revised from their earlier versions with at least 30% new contents or results that comply with the copyright regulations, if any.
Every submitted paper will receive at least three reviews. The editorial review committee will include well known experts in the area of Service, Cloud, and Autonomic computing.
Selection and Evaluation Criteria:
- Significance to the readership of the journal
- Relevance to the special issue
- Originality of idea, technical contribution, and significance of the presented results
- Quality, clarity, and readability of the written text
- Quality of references and related work
- Quality of research hypothesis, assertions, and conclusion
Guest Editors
Dr. Rajiv Ranjan – Corresponding Guest Editor
Research Scientist, CSIRO ICT Center
Computer Science and Information Technology Building (108)
North Road, Australian National University, Acton, ACT, Australia
Email:
Prof. Rajkumar Buyya
CEO, Manjrasoft Pty Ltd, Melbourne, Australia
Director, Cloud Computing and Distributed Systems (CLOUDS) Laboratory
Department of Computing and Information Systems
The University of Melbourne, Australia
Email:
Dr. Surya Nepal
Principal Research Scientist, CSIRO ICT Center
Cnr Viemiera and Pembroke Roads
Marsfield, NSW 2122
Email:
Dr. Dimitrios Georgakopoulos
Research Director, CSIRO ICT Centre
Computer Science and Information Technology Building (108)
North Road, Australian National University, Acton, ACT, Australia
Email: