Unification of monitoring interfaces of federated cloud and Future Internet testbed infrastructures
Yahya Al-Hazmi · DepositOnce · 2016
The federation of information and communication technology infrastructures is gaining significant attention from academia and industry, in particular in the fields of cloud and Future Internet testbeds, where heterogeneous resources and services are shared across multiple administrative domains. This is because of its multilateral benefits for users and infrastructure providers in terms of increasing the capacity of resources and diversity of offerings, as well as efficient resource utilization and complementarity. A major challenge in such federated environments is the exchange of monitoring data across the federation due to the variety and heterogeneity of the tools and interfaces used. Much effort has been made to unify interfaces by the use of common data models and protocols that are task or domain specific, particularly in the network domain. This hinders their application in other domains without significant modifications, becoming even more complex in federated, heterogeneous domains. This thesis addresses this issue and provides an architecture for the unification of monitoring interfaces to enable a unified data representation across federated, heterogeneous infrastructures. This is achieved by three mechanisms: first, an adaptation layer on top of the tools deployed at infrastructure level is responsible for providing the data in a unified representation through a common interface; second, the use of a flexible, extensible and schema-independent data transportation protocol; and third, the use of a common information model that is based on Semantic Web technologies and caters for the collection and representation of data in unified, meaningful manner, as well as facilitating interoperability between tools and data consolidation. This thesis delivers three major contributions as the main research results. These are an extensible monitoring architecture for federated, heterogeneous infrastructures, an ontology-based information model for describing monitoring related concepts and relations in federated, heterogeneous infrastructures at the conceptual and semantic levels, and a prototype implementation that has been validated through selected use-case projects.