AN OCCI COMPLIANT INTERFACE FOR IAAS PROVISIONING

AND MONITORING

Salvatore Venticinque, Alba Amato and Beniamino Di Martino

Dep. of Information Engineering, Second University of Naples, Aversa, Italy

Keywords:

Cloud Agency, Negotiation, Monitoring.

Abstract:

In the Cloud scenario provisioning and monitoring play an important role giving the possibility to maintain

always the best resources conﬁguration that satisﬁes the application requirements. Dynamic Cloud provision-

ing and monitoring allow for the possibility of getting resources in a way that is suited especially well to

the business model of IT companies, which can adapt their costs to the current needs continuously and eas-

ily. A solution for Cloud resource provisioning and monitoring should also be vendor independent, platform

neutral to choose the best proposal among a collection of business offers the widest it is possible. One of

the ﬁrst proposals of standard in Cloud is represented by OCCI (Open Cloud Computing Interface) that is a

protocol and API for all kinds of management tasks. In this paper we describe a proposal of extension of

OCCI to support provisioning, monitoring and reconﬁguration. Furthermore we introduce Cloud Agency, a

software platform that complements the common IAAS management facilities with a set of advanced services

for dynamic provisioning and monitoring of Cloud resources.

1 INTRODUCTION

Cloud computing represents an opportunity for IT

users to reduce costs and increase efﬁciency providing

an alternative way of using IT services. For big com-

panies, which own large physical infrastructures, it al-

lows for high utilization. On the other hand it gives to

small and medium enterprises the possibility of us-

ing services and technologies that were prerogative of

large ones, by paying only for the resources needed

and avoiding upfront investment. In fact both costs

estimation and provisioning can be delayed . But if

there are many advantages for the users, there are also

problems that, if not resolved, can vanish the beneﬁts.

A well known problem is the vendor lock-in, that is

the risk for the user of being locked to a provider ﬁnd-

ing very difﬁcult to migrate its application to other so-

lutions when is not satisﬁed about the service level or

about its cost. This is due to the absence of standards

for Cloud solutions that ensure portability among dif-

ferent vendors’ technologies. To overcome this prob-

lems it is fundamental to have a general purpose set of

speciﬁcations and facilities for cloud that are vendor

independent, platform neutral and can be extended to

solve a variety of problems in Cloud computing. One

of the ﬁrst proposal of standard in Cloud is represent-

ed by OCCI

(Open Cloud Computing Interface) that

is a protocol and API for all kinds of management

tasks. This solutions is aimed at the fulﬁllment of

three requirements: integration, portability and inter-

operability for common tasks including deployment,

autonomic scaling and monitoring still offering a high

degree of extensibility. In this paper we describe

a proposal of extension of OCCI to support provi-

sioning, monitoring and reconﬁguration. Furthermore

we introduce Cloud Agency, a software platform that

complements the common IAAS management facili-

ties with a set of advanced services for dynamic pro-

visioning and monitoring of Cloud resources.

2 RELATED WORK

According to (Buyya et al., 2009) a market-oriented

resource management is needed in order to regulate

the supply and demand of Cloud resources. The cur-

rent Cloud computing technologies offer a limited

support for dynamic negotiation of SLAs between

participants. A Cloud multi-agent management archi-

tecture is proposed in (Cao et al., 2009; You et al.,

2009). Preliminary investigations by the authors on

http://occi-wg.org/

163

Venticinque S., Amato A. and Di Martino B..

AN OCCI COMPLIANT INTERFACE FOR IAAS PROVISIONING AND MONITORING.

DOI: 10.5220/0003932101630166

In Proceedings of the 2nd International Conference on Cloud Computing and Services Science (CLOSER-2012), pages 163-166

ISBN: 978-989-8565-05-1

 2012 SCITEPRESS (Science and Technology Publications, Lda.)

related topics have been presented in (Aversa et al.,

2010). SLA@SOI is the main project that aims (to-

gether with other relevant goals) at offering an open

source based SLA management framework. It will

provide beneﬁts of predictability, transparency and

automation in an arbitrary service-oriented infrastruc-

ture, being compliant with the OCCI standard. In or-

der to check or guarantee an agreed SLA at IAAS

level, it is necessary to monitor performance and qual-

ity indexes, to enforce the agreed service terms. Tra-

ditional monitoring technologies for single machines

or Clusters are restricted to locality and homogeneity

of monitored objects and, therefore, cannot be applied

in the Cloud in an appropriate manner (Emeakaroha

et al., 2011). In (Andrew et al., 2011) an extension

of OCCI for IAAS provisioning is described, but it

doesn’t add new functionalities.

3 OCCI EXTENDED

Obtaining a common interface is the focus of the

OCCI group that deﬁned a model for Cloud manage-

ment at IAAS. OCCI deﬁnes entities, API and pro-

tocol. The speciﬁcation of Cloud API is a Resource

Oriented Architecture (ROA) that uses REpresenta-

tional State Transfer (REST)protocol. The OCCI core

meta-model (Metsch et al., 2011) is shown in the

left part of the Figure 1. It provides means of han-

dling abstract Cloud resources. Any resource exposed

through OCCI is a Resource or a sub-type thereof.

A resource can be e.g. a virtual machine, a job in

a job submission system, a user, etc. The Resource

type is complemented by the Link type which asso-

ciates one Resource instance with another. Entity is

an abstract type, which both Resource and Link in-

herit. Each sub-type of Entity is identiﬁed by a unique

Kind instance. The Kind type is the core of the type

classiﬁcation system built into the OCCI Core Model.

Kind is a specialization of Category and introduces

additional resource capabilities in terms of Actions.

An Action represents an invocable operation appli-

cable to a resource instance. The last type deﬁned

by the OCCI Core Model is the Mixin type. An in-

stance of Mixin can be associated with a resource

instance, i.e. a sub-type of Entity, to ”mixin” ad-

ditional resource capabilities at run-time. Resources

can be managed using a set of operations create, re-

trieve, update and delete. Currently three types of re-

sources are considered: storage, network and com-

pute resources. It is also possible to manage state

(start, stop, restart) and create new resources using

actions. In order to extend the OCCI model by auto-

nomic and dynamic services, it is necessary that new

Figure 1: OCCI Extended model.

functionalities can be deployed in user’s Cloud. To

be compliant with the standard it is necessary to ex-

tend the core model using inheritance of MIXIN to

provide IAAS resources with monitoring and provi-

sioning capabilities, and ENTITY, to represent those

new concepts, which are introduced by the services

we are going to describe. In Figure 1 the new entities

and mixin, an their relationship with the OCCI core

model are shown. Among the entities, a Call for Pro-

posal (CFP) describes the list of resources which are

necessary to run a Cloud application. A Cloud cus-

tomer deﬁnes the values of those attributes of OCCI

Compute, Storage and Links which are signiﬁcant for

his application requirements. A CFP will include also

the negotiation rules to select the best offer among

the ones proposed by providers. A Proposal is a can-

didate for a Service Level Agreement(SLA). It in-

cludes an instance for each resource in the CFP with

all the attribute speciﬁed, including other informa-

tion such as the cost and service levels. It can be

accepted or refused by the customer. An SLA is an

accepted proposal, it is agreed by the customer with

one provider. Among the new mixin, a Vendor is com-

mitted to get an offer for resource provisioning, to ac-

cept or refuse that offer, to get information about a

resource or to perform an action on it against a spe-

ciﬁc Cloud provider or technology. A Broker is an

intermediary that provides information and assists in

ﬁnding the right cloud-based solution. It receives a

CFP, ask to vendors for available offers, brokers the

proposal that best serves the user and allows to close

the transaction. The Meter is a mixin that monitors

some parameters chosen by user and gives the mea-

sure of performance indexes for those parameters. It

can be deployed into the Cloud, within a Virtual Ma-

chines, to dynamically complement the user’s Cloud

resource with this new capability. We need to run

Meter instances on any resource to perform locally

specialized algorithm to take measures. An Archiver

collects measures from Meters and stores them in a

CLOSER2012-2ndInternationalConferenceonCloudComputingandServicesScience

164

knowledge base. It provides metrics and performance

statistics computed on the knowledge base. A Tier is

a mixin that use statistics provided by the Archiver, it

detects critical conditions such as SLA violations, re-

source saturation or underutilization and then informs

the user or autonomically performs required reaction

as new provisioning or management.

4 CLOUD AGENCY DESIGN

Cloud Agency uses the agents technology to imple-

ments the OCCI extended model. Each mixin pre-

sented before will be implemented by a software

agent. According to our extended OCCI model Cloud

Agency is both a mixin itself and a collection of those

mixin presented before. It can run anywhere, also in

an user’s Resource, if it has been implemented as a de-

ployable software component. Cloud Agency can ac-

cess, on behalf of the user, the utility market of Cloud

computing to maintain always the best resources con-

ﬁguration that satisﬁes the application requirements.

This system is being designed and developed within

the research activities of the FP7 mOSAIC project.

It is in charge to provide the collection of Cloud

resources, from different vendors, that continuously

meets the requirements of users applications. Ac-

cording to the available offers, it generates a service

level agreement that represents the result of resource

brokering and booking with available providers. The

user is able to delegate to the Agency the monitor-

ing of resource utilization, the necessary checks of the

agreement fulﬁllment and eventually re-negotiations.

Cloud Agency will supplement the common manage-

ment functionalities which are currently provided by

IAAS Private and Public infrastructure with new ad-

vanced services, by implementing transparent layer

to IAAS Private and Public Cloud services. Cloud

Agency will support the Cloud user in two differ-

ent scenarios: Deployment, to discover and buy the

available resources needed to run Cloud applications;

and Execution, to monitor and eventually to reconﬁg-

ure Cloud resources according the changed require-

ments of the Cloud Application. The following con-

cepts of CA appear in the General Overview of Cloud

Agency. A Call for proposals (CFP) is a document

that deﬁne requirements of resource to be acquired,

prices and other information relevant for the negotia-

tion. A Resource List is the part of the CFP where

necessary resources and their attributes are speciﬁed.

PolicyLists are different rules to be used for deﬁning

resource brokering strategies that take in input users

requirements and providers offers. Cloud Resources

are the result of the CA Provisioning. They are de-

Figure 2: Cloud Agency Conceptual Model.

scribed, together service levels and other information

in a Service Level Agreement (SLA).

The blue components of Figure 2 represent agents

and provide the necessary facilities to expose Provi-

sioning, Management, Monitoring and Reconﬁgura-

tion Services. In particular the Vendor implements a

wrapper for a speciﬁc Cloud. It is used to get an of-

fer for resource provisioning, to accept or refuse that

offer, to get information about a resource or to per-

form an action on it (start, stop, resume). Brokers re-

ceive a CFP, ask to vendors for available offers, broke

the best one and allow to close the transaction. Me-

ters are deployed on Cloud resources to measure per-

formance indexes. The Archiver collects measures

from Meters and store them in a knowledge base. It

provides metrics and performance ﬁgures computed

on the knowledge base. Tiers use reconﬁguration

policies to: detect critical events from performance

monitoring of Resource; evaluate critical conditions,

such as SLA violations, saturation or underutiliza-

tion; perform required reaction as new provisioning

or management. The Mediator receives information

and conﬁguration requests directly from the user. It is

in charge of starting new transaction for provisioning

by creating broker agents. It starts also new tiers and

meters, and returns information about CA conﬁgura-

tion and services. In Figure 3 the Cloud user prepares

a CFP to be sent to the Cloud Agency. The Cloud

Agency returns a proposal from a Cloud Provider that

satisﬁes those requirements. If the mOSAIC User

accepts that Proposal an SLA is agreed and the of-

fered resources have been allocated. After that the

User can use the Platform for the application Deploy-

ment. The mOSAIC user exploits an Application Tool

for resource provisioning to deﬁne his requirements

at IAAS and to start a transaction. The Mediator re-

ceives the CFP, creates a Broker instance that is re-

sponsible to handle that CFP. The Broker search for

available Vendors and asks for a proposal to each one.

It collects the proposals and performs a brokering to

choice the best one. In an asynchronous way the best

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165

Figure 3: Interaction Model for Provisioning.

proposal is notiﬁed to the Application Tool that re-

trieves the proposal details and waits for the Users

agreement. If the user agrees the proposal is amended

and the resources are allocated.

Cloud Agency has been implemented as a Multi

Agent systems. Execution environment for agents

and communication facilities are provided by the Jade

agent platform(Bellifemine et al., 2003). Jade has

been chosen as a platform to provide an execution en-

vironment of software agents, an Agent Communica-

tion Channel (ACC) and some protocol implementa-

tion to support communication. AMS and DF provide

standard services of FIPA compliant agent platforms:

a name server for agents and a yellow pages registry

for publication and discovery of agent base services.

Agents implement the new OCCI MIX-INs deﬁned

in section 3. They embed the interaction protocols of

the deployment and execution scenarios. Agents will

communicate among them via standard ACL (Agent

Communication Language) over HTTP, or over other

transport protocols if it is necessary.

5 CONCLUSIONS

In this paper we presented a proposal of extension of

OCCI to support provisioning, monitoring and recon-

ﬁguration. Standardization will allow user to choose

in cloud without vendor lock-in and to realize porta-

bility giving the possibility to use the cloud services

provided by multiple vendors so enjoying the full ben-

eﬁts of cloud computing. In particular here we de-

signed new runtime capability which can be added

to the Cloud at IAAS for for autonomic provisioning

and monitoring. Finally we introduced the design of

Cloud Agency, an agents based software platform the

implements the proposed model.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

This work has been supported by the FP7-ICT-2009-

5-256910 (mOSAIC) EU project and by the MIUR-

PRIN 2008 Cloud@Home: a New Enhanced Com-

puting Paradigm.

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