Light-Weighted Decision Support Framework for Selecting Cloud Service Providers

Multi-criteria decision making(MCDM)is a technique used to achieve better outcomes for some complex business-related problems,whereby the selection of the best alternative can be made in as many cases as possible.This paper proposes a model,the multi-criteria decision support method,that allows both service providers and consumers to maximize their profits while preserving the best matching process for resource allocation and task scheduling.The increasing number of service providers with different service provision capabilities creates an issue for consumers seeking to select the best service provider.Each consumer seeks a service provider based on various preferences,such as price,service quality,and time to complete the tasks.In the literature,the problem is viewed from different perspectives,such as investigating how to enhance task scheduling and the resource allocation process,improve consumers’trust,and deal with network problems.This paper offers a novel model that considers the preferences of both service providers and consumers to find the best available service provider for each consumer.First,the model adopts the best-worst method(BWM)to gather and prioritize tasks based on consumers’and service providers’preferences.Then,the model calculates and matches similarities between the sets of tasks from the consumer’s side with the sets of tasks from the provider’s side to select the best service provider for each consumer using the two proposed algorithms.The complexity of the two algorithms is found to be O(n3).

Hybrid Chameleon and Honey Badger Optimization Algorithm for QoS-Based Cloud Service Composition Problem

Cloud computing facilitates the great potentiality of storing and managing remote access to services in terms of software as a service(SaaS).Several organizations have moved towards outsourcing over the cloud to reduce the burden on local resources.In this context,the metaheuristic optimization method is determined to be highly suitable for selecting appropriate services that comply with the requirements of the client’s requests,as the services stored over the cloud are too complex and scalable.To achieve better service composition,the parameters of Quality of Service(QoS)related to each service considered to be the best resource need to be selected and optimized for attaining potential services over the cloud.Thus,the cloud service composition needs to concentrate on the selection and integration of services over the cloud to satisfy the client’s requests.In this paper,a Hybrid Chameleon and Honey Badger Optimization Algorithm(HCHBOA)-based cloud service composition scheme is presented for achieving efficient services with satisfying the requirements ofQoS over the cloud.This proposed HCHBOA integrated the merits of the Chameleon Search Algorithm(CSA)and Honey Badger Optimization Algorithm(HBOA)for balancing the tradeoff between the rate of exploration and exploitation.It specifically used HBOA for tuning the parameters of CSA automatically so that CSA could adapt its performance depending on its incorporated tuning factors.The experimental results of the proposed HCHBOA with experimental datasets exhibited its predominance by improving the response time by 21.38%,availability by 20.93%and reliability by 19.31%with a minimized execution time of 23.18%,compared to the baseline cloud service composition schemes used for investigation.

Cloud services with big data provide a solution for monitoring and tracking sustainable development goals

To achieve the Sustainable Development Goals(SDGs),high-quality data are needed to inform the formulation of policies and investment decisions,to monitor progress towards the SDGs and to evaluate the impacts of policies.However,the data landscape is changing.With emerging big data and cloud-based services,there are new opportunities for data collection,influencing both official data collection processes and the operation of the programmes they monitor.This paper uses cases and examples to explore the potential of crowdsourcing and public earth observation(EO)data products for monitoring and tracking the SDGs.This paper suggests that cloud-based services that integrate crowdsourcing and public EO data products provide cost-effective solutions for monitoring and tracking the SDGs,particularly for low-income countries.The paper also discusses the challenges of using cloud services and big data for SDG monitoring.Validation and quality control of public EO data is very important;otherwise,the user will be unable to assess the quality of the data or use it with confidence.

A rapid, low-cost deep learning system to classify strawberry disease based on cloud service

Accurate and timely classification of diseases during strawberry planting can help growers deal with them in timely manner, thereby reducing losses. However, the classification of strawberry diseases in real planting environments is facing severe challenges, including complex planting environments, multiple disease categories with small differences, and so on. Although recent mobile vision technology based deep learning has achieved some success in overcoming the above problems, a key problem is how to construct a non-destructive, fast and convenient method to improve the efficiency of strawberry disease identification for the multi-region, multi-space and multi-time classification requirements. We develop and evaluate a rapid, low-cost system for classifying diseases in strawberry cultivation. This involves designing an easy-to-use cloudbased strawberry disease identification system, combined with our novel self-supervised multi-network fusion classification model, which consists of a Location network, a Feedback network and a Classification network to identify the categories of common strawberry diseases. With the help of a novel self-supervision mechanism, the model can effectively identify diseased regions of strawberry disease images without the need for annotations such as bounding boxes. Using accuracy, precision, recall and F1 to evaluate the classification effect, the results of the test set are 92.48, 90.68, 86.32 and 88.45%, respectively. Compared with popular Convolutional Neural Networks(CNN) and five other methods, our network achieves better disease classification effect. Currently, the client(mini program) has been released on the We Chat platform. The mini program has perfect classification effect in the actual test, which verifies the feasibility and effectiveness of the system, and can provide a reference for the intelligent research and application of strawberry disease identification.

MimicCloudSim:An Environment for Modeling and Simulation of Mimic Cloud Service

In recent years,an increasing number of application services are deployed in the cloud.However,the cloud platform faces unknown security threats brought by its unknown vulnerabilities and backdoors.Many researchers have studied the Cyber Mimic Defense(CMD)technologies of the cloud services.However,there is a shortage of tools that enable researchers to evaluate their newly proposed cloud service CMD mechanisms,such as scheduling and decision mechanisms.To fill this gap,we propose MimicCloudSim as a mimic cloud service simulation system based on the basic functionalities of CloudSim.MimicCloudSim supports the simulation of dynamic heterogeneous redundancy(DHR)structure which is the core architecture of CMD technology,and provides an extensible interface to help researchers implement new scheduling and decision mechanisms.In this paper,we firstly describes the architecture and implementation of MimicCloudSim,and then discusses the simulation process.Finally,we demonstrate the capabilities of MimicCloudSim by using a decision mechanism.In addition,we tested the performance of MimicCloudSim,the conclusion shows that MimicCloudSim is highly scalable.

Access Control Policy Analysis and Access Denial Method for Cloud Services

Personal cloud computing is an emerging trend in the computer industry. For a sustainable service, cloud computing services must control user access. The essential business characteristics of cloud computing are payment status and service level agreement. This work proposes a novel access control method for personal cloud service business. The proposed method sets metadata, policy analysis rules, and access denying rules. Metadata define the structure of access control policies and user requirements for cloud services. The policy analysis rules are used to compare conflicts and redundancies between access control policies. The access denying rules apply policies for inhibiting inappropriate access. The ontology is a theoretical foundation of this method. In this work, ontologies for payment status, access permission, service level, and the cloud provide semantic information needed to execute rules. A scenario of personal data backup cloud service is also provided in this work. This work potentially provides cloud service providers with a convenient method of controlling user access according to changeable business and marketing strategies.

Research on Trust Model in Container-Based Cloud Service

Container virtual technology aims to provide program independence and resource sharing.The container enables flexible cloud service.Compared with traditional virtualization,traditional virtual machines have difficulty in resource and expense requirements.The container technology has the advantages of smaller size,faster migration,lower resource overhead,and higher utilization.Within container-based cloud environment,services can adopt multi-target nodes.This paper reports research results to improve the traditional trust model with consideration of cooperation effects.Cooperation trust means that in a container-based cloud environment,services can be divided into multiple containers for different container nodes.When multiple target nodes work for one service at the same time,these nodes are in a cooperation state.When multi-target nodes cooperate to complete the service,the target nodes evaluate each other.The calculation of cooperation trust evaluation is used to update the degree of comprehensive trust.Experimental simulation results show that the cooperation trust evaluation can help solving the trust problem in the container-based cloud environment and can improve the success rate of following cooperation.

Design of a Cloud Service for Learning Chinese Pronunciation

With the fast growing of cloud computing infrastructure, learning from cloud services has become more and more convenient for people worldwide. In order to integrate the cloud computing technology and different e-learning platforms including variant mobile apps, Windows and web-based applications, we develop our Chinese learning system ＂analytic Chinese helper＂ with a service-oriented architecture （SOA）. Based on the new architecture we designed and developed a cloud service for the e-learning of Chinese language on the Internet as a convenient resource for foreign students, especially in the reading of Chinese texts. There are two Chinese phonetic systems： Pinyin and Zhuyin. Pinyin is the official Romanization of Chinese characters, and Zhuyin incorporates additional Bopomofo symbols which transcribe precise sounds of Chinese characters. The proposed analytic Chinese helper provides real-time annotations with Pinyin or Zhuyin symbols, and thereby the annotated articles can be used as e-learning objects in learning Chinese.

An Integrated Framework for Cloud Service Selection Based on BOM and TOPSIS

Many businesses have experienced difficulties in selecting a cloud service provider(CSP)due to the rapid advancement of cloud computing services and the proliferation of CSPs.Many independent criteria should be considered when evaluating the services provided by different CSPs.It is a case of multi-criteria decision-making(MCDM).This paper presents an integrated MCDM cloud service selection framework for determining the most appropriate service provider based on the best only method(BOM)and technique for order of preference by similarity to ideal solution(TOPSIS).To obtain the weights of criteria and the relative importance of CSPs based on each criterion,BOM performs pairwise comparisons of criteria and also for alternatives on each criterion,and TOPSIS uses these weights to rank cloud alternatives.An evaluation and validation of the proposed framework have been carried out through a use-case model to prove its efficiency and accuracy.Moreover,the developed framework was compared with the analytical hierarchical process(AHP),a popular MCDM approach,based on two perspectives:efficiency and consistency.According to the research results,the proposed framework only requires 25%of the comparisons needed for the AHP approach.Furthermore,the proposed framework has a CR of 0%,whereas AHP has 38%.Thus,the proposed framework performs better than AHPwhen it comes to computation complexity and consistency,implying that it is more efficient and trustworthy.

SDN-Based Broadband Network for Cloud Services

Over-the-top services and cloud services have created great challenges for telecom operators. To better meet the requirements of cloud services, we propose a decoupled network architecture. Software-defined networking/network function virtualization （SDN/ NFV） will be vital in the construction of cloud-oriented broadband infrastructure, especially within data centers and for intercon nection between data centers. We also propose introducing SDN/NFV in the broadband access network in order to realize a virtu- alized residential gateway （VRG）. We discuss the deployment modes of VRG.

Cloud Services Quality Enhancement through Control &Monitoring of Service Level Agreements at Server and Consumer Side

Several researches and case studies have been revealing a repetitive issue and that is monopolization of controlling, measuring, and metering of the consumer’s billing for the consumed Cloud Services. The Cloud Service Providers (CSPs) have been hiding, or monopolizing the controlling, metering tools and ignoring the calculation and consideration of the service defects like downtime, service outage, poor performance and client service migration delays during overloads of the servers. The main issues behind these discrepancies are the Service Level Agreement (SLA), its violation, and the monopolized Cloud Governance. Till now there is a lack of parallel monitoring and metering system of the consumed cloud services at the customer level under the provisions of SLAs. The Cloud Governance Tier has not given any flexibility or utility to monitor such consumed cloud services at the client tier in parallel to the CSP tier. This research is an effort to develop a SLA controlling/monitoring framework to solve the identified problems other than the CSP level. Further the E_Draw max was used for designing the framework. The framework consists of the components like;SLA_CSP, SLA_CSC, SLA_M&C and Cloud Services and Delivery Models. After designing the framework, a prototype was developed using CloudSim on java net beans, and MySQL database. This prototype was implemented using four scenarios to evaluate its performance and the functionalities. 1) Checking the SLA under CSP whether the resources to the consumer in the same manner with promised. 2) To check if the request from cloud consumer is less than what is expected in SLA. 3) To check by increasing the request of cloud consumer more than what is expected in SLA and 4) Using the SLA_M&C mechanism. After execution it was observed that, in the first and the second cases there is no violation, but there is violation in the third and fourth cases. This implied that there are chances of the discrepancies in resources provided to make the selves beneficiary beyond SLA under CSP and CSC was discriminated while receiving services from CSP.

From New Media to Cloud Service,Can Independent College Libraries Face It Calmly?—Based on the Investigation and Analysis of Relevant Applications of Independent College Libraries in Jiangsu Province

The emergence and application of new media are both opportunities and challenges for the development of libraries.In light of statistical analysis of development and use of new media platform tools such as the library portal websites of independent colleges in Jiangsu Province,WeChat,MicroBlog,and mobile libraries,etc.,the author in this paper is aimed at studying independent college libraries’self-development level and innovation of service models under the new information network environment as well as how to win favorable time and space so as to easily face the advent of cloud service era.

Evaluation of Parameters Importance in Cloud Service Selection Using Rough Sets

With the rapid development of the cloud computing technology, it has matured enough for a lot of individuals and organizations to move their work into the cloud. Correspondingly, a variety of cloud services are emerging. It is a key issue to assess the cloud services in order to help the cloud users select the most suitable cloud service and the cloud providers offer this service with the highest quality. The criteria parameters defining the cloud services are complex which lead to cloud service deviation. In this paper, we propose an assessment method of parameters importance in cloud services using rough set theory. The method can effectively compute the importance of cloud services parameters and sort them. On the one hand, the calculation can be used as the credible reference when users choose their appropriate cloud services. On the other hand, it can help cloud service providers to meet user requirements and enhance the user experience. The simulation results show the effectiveness of the method and its relevance in the cloud context.

A Cloud Service Model for Multilingual Home-School Communications

In this paper, we present a cloud service model of multilingual home-school communications （MHSC） with the Drupal framework to provide a friendly learning environment for the students from transnational marriages. The transnational marriage is a phenomenon with ever-increasing in Taiwan and around the world. For a student who has a transnational foreign mother, home-school communication is often an obstacle because the foreign mother has language difficulty understanding the delivered messages in the communication book from teachers. In order to improve parent-teacher communications for the transnational families, we designed and constructed the cloud service platform with online multilingual communications and translation service functions, such that teachers can prepare different sheets of multilingual messages for home-school communication books and foreign mothers can read the messages from the teachers in their native languages through the web interface.

An Adaptive Video-on-Demand Framework for Multimedia Cross-Platform Cloud Services

Although Video-On-Demand (VOD) has been in existence for years, its cross-platform applicability in cloud service environments is still in increasing need. In this paper, an Adaptive Video-On-Demand (AVOD) framework that is suitable for private cloud environments is proposed. Private cloud has the key advantage of satisfying the real need of both consumers and providers. Hence, demands such as reasonable benefits for provider and high quality for consumers are essential design considerations in this framework. The difficulty is that these two factors are always high in one end and low in the other, and hard to find a delicate balance. Cloud service could be an opportunity for the multimedia providers to obtain higher benefits and cost less for the consumers but with an even better quality in service. An adaptive framework for such a cloud service environment is proposed to resolve this problem. Some interesting phenomena are observed from the experimental results including CPU utilization, data reading and writing speed, memory usage, port configuration execution time, and bandwidth.

Cloud Datacenter Selection Using Service Broker Policies:A Survey

Amid the landscape of Cloud Computing(CC),the Cloud Datacenter(DC)stands as a conglomerate of physical servers,whose performance can be hindered by bottlenecks within the realm of proliferating CC services.A linchpin in CC’s performance,the Cloud Service Broker(CSB),orchestrates DC selection.Failure to adroitly route user requests with suitable DCs transforms the CSB into a bottleneck,endangering service quality.To tackle this,deploying an efficient CSB policy becomes imperative,optimizing DC selection to meet stringent Qualityof-Service(QoS)demands.Amidst numerous CSB policies,their implementation grapples with challenges like costs and availability.This article undertakes a holistic review of diverse CSB policies,concurrently surveying the predicaments confronted by current policies.The foremost objective is to pinpoint research gaps and remedies to invigorate future policy development.Additionally,it extensively clarifies various DC selection methodologies employed in CC,enriching practitioners and researchers alike.Employing synthetic analysis,the article systematically assesses and compares myriad DC selection techniques.These analytical insights equip decision-makers with a pragmatic framework to discern the apt technique for their needs.In summation,this discourse resoundingly underscores the paramount importance of adept CSB policies in DC selection,highlighting the imperative role of efficient CSB policies in optimizing CC performance.By emphasizing the significance of these policies and their modeling implications,the article contributes to both the general modeling discourse and its practical applications in the CC domain.

Cloud-Based Software Development Lifecycle:A Simplified Algorithm for Cloud Service Provider Evaluation with Metric Analysis

At present,hundreds of cloud vendors in the global market provide various services based on a customer’s requirements.All cloud vendors are not the same in terms of the number of services,infrastructure availability,security strategies,cost per customer,and reputation in the market.Thus,software developers and organizations face a dilemma when choosing a suitable cloud vendor for their developmental activities.Thus,there is a need to evaluate various cloud service providers(CSPs)and platforms before choosing a suitable vendor.Already existing solutions are either based on simulation tools as per the requirements or evaluated concerning the quality of service attributes.However,they require more time to collect data,simulate and evaluate the vendor.The proposed work compares various CSPs in terms of major metrics,such as establishment,services,infrastructure,tools,pricing models,market share,etc.,based on the comparison,parameter ranking,and weightage allocated.Furthermore,the parameters are categorized depending on the priority level.The weighted average is calculated for each CSP,after which the values are sorted in descending order.The experimental results show the unbiased selection of CSPs based on the chosen parameters.The proposed parameter-ranking priority level weightage(PRPLW)algorithm simplifies the selection of the best-suited cloud vendor in accordance with the requirements of software development.

RESTlogic: Detecting Logic Vulnerabilities in Cloud REST APIs

logical testing model and resource lifecycle information,generate test cases and complete parameters,and alleviate inconsistency issues through parameter inference.Once again,we propose a method of analyzing test results using joint state codes and call stack information,which compensates for the shortcomings of traditional analysis methods.We will apply our method to testing REST services,including OpenStack,an open source cloud operating platform for experimental evaluation.We have found a series of inconsistencies,known vulnerabilities,and new unknown logical defects.

Transparent Computing: Spatio-Temporal Extension on von Neumann Architecture for Cloud Services

The rapid advancements in hardware, software, and computer networks have facilitated the shift of the computing paradigm from mainframe to cloud computing, in which users can get their desired services anytime, anywhere, and by any means. However, cloud computing also presents many challenges, one of which is the difficulty in allowing users to freely obtain desired services, such as heterogeneous OSes and applications, via different light-weight devices. We have proposed a new paradigm by spatio-temporally extending the von Neumann architecture, called transparent computing, to centrally store and manage the commodity programs including OS codes, while streaming them to be run in non-state clients. This leads to a service-centric computing environment, in which users can select the desired services on demand, without concern for these services＇ administration, such as their installation, maintenance, management, and upgrade. In this paper, we introduce a novel concept, namely Meta OS, to support such program streaming through a distributed 4VP~ platform. Based on this platform, a pilot system has been implemented, which supports Windows and Linux environments. We verify the effectiveness of the platform through both real deployments and testbed experiments. The evaluation results suggest that the 4VP~ platform is a feasible and promising solution for the future computing infrastructure for cloud services.

A Multi-dimensional Trust-aware Cloud Service Selection Mechanism Based on Evidential Reasoning Approach

In the last few years, cloud computing as a new computing paradigm has gone through significant development, but it is also facing many problems. One of them is the cloud service selection problem. As increasingly boosting cloud services are offered through the internet and some of them may be not reliable or even malicious, how to select trustworthy cloud services for cloud users is a big challenge. In this paper, we propose a multi-dimensional trust-aware cloud service selection mechanism based on evidential reasoning(ER) approach that integrates both perception-based trust value and reputation based trust value, which are derived from direct and indirect trust evidence respectively, to identify trustworthy services. Here, multi-dimensional trust evidence, which reflects the trustworthiness of cloud services from different aspects, is elicited in the form of historical users feedback ratings. Then, the ER approach is applied to aggregate the multi-dimensional trust ratings to obtain the real-time trust value and select the most trustworthy cloud service of certain type for the active users. Finally, the fresh feedback from the active users will update the trust evidence for other service users in the future.