Elsevier

Future Generation Computer Systems

Volume 41, December 2014, Pages 104-120
Future Generation Computer Systems

4CaaSt marketplace: An advanced business environment for trading cloud services

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.future.2014.02.020Get rights and content

Highlights

  • Implementation of a one-stop marketplace solution for trading cloud services.

  • Advanced price model simulation and design tools for effective definition of cloud products.

  • Resolution mechanisms for business aware search and selection of XaaS offerings.

Abstract

As Clouds mature and become ubiquitous, marketplace environments are developed facilitating the provision of services in a manner that emphasizes on the modular composition of individual services across different providers that crosscut the cloud service stack layers (i.e. composition of XaaS) to fulfil customers’ requirements. Besides acting as intermediaries for the search, selection and trading of services, such marketplaces should also support the complete service lifecycle and the consolidation of offerings from different providers with varying and often contradicting business goals. In this paper we present a one-stop cloud marketplace solution that addresses the aforementioned challenges while enabling the simulation of different business cases to optimize service offerings according to a wide and dynamic set of parameters. Moreover, the proposed solution introduces advanced aggregated price models and integrates a new resolution approach that incorporates business intelligence into the search and selection processes. We also demonstrate the operation of the implemented approach and evaluate its effectiveness using a real-world scenario, based on a taxi fleet management application.

Introduction

Following an increasing number of technical advancements in the area of cloud computing, the notion of XaaS (Everything as a Service)  [1], [2] is nowadays very common across the cloud providers to characterize the trading and provisioning of any type of ICT assets as cloud products. To this direction, many different types of providers can be identified, that offer a variety of cloud-based services across the cloud stack layers, according to the SPI model  [3], with the most widely accepted ones referring to Software (SaaS), Platform (PaaS) and Infrastructure (IaaS) as a Service. Various characteristics, such as virtualization of hardware, rapid service provisioning, scalability, elasticity, accounting granularity and cost allocation models enable Clouds to efficiently adapt resource provisioning to the dynamic demands of Internet users.

In this new paradigm, users’ and providers’ requirements go beyond the aforementioned technical characteristics, getting into the business space  [4]. “The interesting question is whether and how services will be traded in the future”  [5]. In a world of multi-stakeholder information and services, environments are required that will allow for the seamless integration of business and technical aspects into the service provision process. To this direction, emerging marketplaces aim at enabling the provision of “products” as potentially composite service offerings that may incorporate services from different providers within and across the cloud service stack layers  [6]. Marketplaces provide a focal point for various stakeholders supporting the complete service lifecycle (planning, analysis and design, development and testing, provisioning, deployment, discovery, composition, execution, and monitoring  [7]). What is more, marketplaces support advanced pricing and billing capabilities  [8], by considering and managing various and possibly diverse business terms and conditions (i.e. price, revenue sharing, promotion). Even though the term “marketplace” is a business term, cloud marketplace environments address several technical challenges besides business ones. Support for the heterogeneity of services, has been highlighted as one of current Internet design principles that should remain in the Future Internet architecture  [9]. To this direction, marketplaces allow for products offering consisting of potentially heterogeneous services from different providers. Furthermore, a fundamental new design principle of the Future Internet architecture refers to information diffusion and exchange leading to the so-called “all-win” situation  [9]. As described in the corresponding report, future internet should allow for “the exchange of information between layers and players principle, which suggests that different stakeholders should be able to provide to others information on possible choices and their preferences”. Information diffusion enabled through marketplaces refers not only to aggregation, collection and assessment but also to decision making in a multi-stakeholder environment. Marketplace mechanisms allow for such decision making through approaches that interpret high-level business and technical requirements and provide selection proposals and recommendations for product compositions. Moreover, marketplaces go beyond SLA-based selection of services  [10] or discovery of services based on performance prediction and analysis; marketplaces employ techniques for pricing models and business resolution revenue sharing through analysis of existing dependencies between the providers of the corresponding products.

Cloud marketplaces, as environments where all stakeholders who are involved in the service lifecycle participate to satisfy their business goals, are not very common, while the few existing approaches (analysed in Section  2) lack basic functionality, such as the support of composite offerings or the automated resolution of the customers’ requirements. Therefore the need of forward-looking marketplaces for cloud services and resources that follow the technical advancements of cloud technologies is noticeable. These one-stop shops of cloud offerings will both improve the effectiveness of Clouds as true business ecosystems and also leverage the wide adoption of cloud technologies.

In this paper we present a marketplace environment for the provision of cloud services through a dynamic and fair ecosystem of all involved stakeholders. Providers utilize marketplace functionalities to define new product offerings, business-related information and service level objectives, while users may pose specific service requests and contract providers. Nevertheless the unique offerings of the proposed marketplace are not limited to the aforementioned provider–user interaction and the underlying product aggregation and composition, but are focused on the interplay between technical and business aspects of service provisioningaddressing the challenges related with pricing models in distributed environments  [11], [12]. The marketplace incorporates a pricing simulator for the offered products, allowing providers to evaluate the pricing model accompanied with the product and linked with its (technical and business) characteristics. According to the simulation process, the marketplace proposes specific pricing models and implements them for each product in a dynamic way. The latter allows for product customization given that service aggregation and deployment may be configured based on the users requirements and current market context (i.e. dynamic offerings from providers). Furthermore, the marketplace enables for automated revenue sharing across different providers based on their contributions in the offered product, while delivering end users with an end-to-end solution for selecting products based on technical and business criteria, which are in sequel considered by the marketplace functions during the contracting and provisioning process. The proposed marketplace has been developed in the framework of 4CaaSt EU-funded research project  [13]. However, the algorithms and functionalities have been developed following a service oriented architectural design that allows its incorporation in any cloud environment since it can be invoked as a (third-party) service (see Section  5), while the data being exploited can be defined through the schema described in Section  6.1.

The rest of the paper is structured as follows. Section  2 presents the related work on electronic marketplaces and the outcomes of a survey on the capabilities of existing electronic marketplace environments. Section  3 highlights the role of the proposed solution in a cloud environment. The key innovations of the proposed marketplace are presented in Section  4, while the architecture and implementation details are presented in Sections  5 Architecture, 6 Implementation respectively. Section  7 presents experimental outcomes of a marketplace prototype and the evaluation outcomes from a group of experts. Finally Section  8 concludes our work and highlights our future plans for its extension.

Section snippets

Related work

There are various approaches emphasizing on the importance of mediators in electronic markets  [14], [15]. Even from the older computational grid environments and the early cloud implementations, marketplace frameworks have an important role, especially on the transition from a scientific to a more business ecosystems  [16], [17], [18]. Such markets aim at enabling service requests and the corresponding offering in a structured manner, price negotiation, contract definition and customization as

The marketplace in a cloud environment

As discussed in the previous section, electronic marketplaces accommodate a wide set of features and embrace novel characteristics in order to allow for effective trading of cloud based services and resources. The proposed marketplace has been designed and implemented as part of 4CaaSt cloud platform  [25] to address the requirements and use cases for (a) individuals, (b) SMEs and (c) enterprises, however, by following service oriented design principles and by defining abstraction layers for

4CaaSt marketplace innovations

Even though a cloud marketplace shares many characteristics with the generic electronic marketplaces, it includes some unique features being part of a modern cloud environment, which were in fact the motivation for our work. In the following sections we analyse how the 4CaaSt Marketplace addresses these challenges and which are in fact the innovations introduced with the realization of these features. It should be noted that our main effort on this marketplace, for which a prototype is already

Architecture

The detailed architectural design of the 4CaaSt marketplace including the main components, repositories and interfaces with the rest 4CaaSt Platform and the end-users is presented in Fig. 3. The architectural design follows service oriented design principles and an independent data model for information exchange (see Section  6.1). The motivation for that was first of all the coupling of the marketplace from a specific cloud platform so as to be compatible with any cloud environment and

Implementation

In this section we describe the implementation details for the 4CaaSt Marketplace, focusing on its unique features.

Evaluation and experimentation

A prototype of our work has already been implemented, deployed and configured on the cloud infrastructure of Flexiscale  [42] along with the rest 4CaaSt platform. Since, as we already mentioned in Section  4, the focus of our work is on the flexibility of pricing models and the business resolution of customers’ requests, the evaluation on the marketplace features had a similar scope. The methodology that we followed for the evaluation had two different perspectives. On the one hand, we

Conclusions & outlook

This paper presents a new cloud marketplace as a solution for increasing the transparency and efficiency of the cloud environments. The proposed marketplace is considered as a one-stop solution for trading cloud services, integrating smoothly with the cloud platform and addressing many business and technical challenges across the overall service lifecycle, from the offline simulation, to the effective selection of services and finally to the revenue sharing and analytics. A prototype of the

Acknowledgements

This work has been supported by the 4CaaSt Project and has been partly funded by the European Commission’s IST priority of the 7th Framework Programme under contract number 258862. This paper expresses the opinions of the authors and not necessarily those of the European Commission. The European Commission is not liable for any use that may be made of the information contained in this paper.

Andreas Menychtas graduated from the School of Electrical and Computer Engineering, National Technical University of Athens (NTUA) in 2004. In 2009, he received his Ph.D. in area of Distributed Computing from the School of Electrical and Computer Engineering of the National Technical University of Athens. His research interests include Cloud Computing, Distributed Systems, Web Services, Object Oriented Programming, Service Oriented Architectures, Security and Information Engineering. Currently,

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    Andreas Menychtas graduated from the School of Electrical and Computer Engineering, National Technical University of Athens (NTUA) in 2004. In 2009, he received his Ph.D. in area of Distributed Computing from the School of Electrical and Computer Engineering of the National Technical University of Athens. His research interests include Cloud Computing, Distributed Systems, Web Services, Object Oriented Programming, Service Oriented Architectures, Security and Information Engineering. Currently, he works as research engineer at the Institute of Communication and Computer Systems (ICCS) of National Technical University of Athens.

    Since 2008, Jürgen Vogel has been employed as a Senior Researcher at SAP Research. He was the project lead for the EU FP7 project SOA4All and co-lead for the EU FP7 projects FAST and 4CaaSt. Previously, he received M.Sc. and Ph.D. degrees in Computer Science from the University of Mannheim, in 1999 and 2004, respectively. In 2002, he worked at IBM T.J. Watson Research in Cambridge. Between 2004 and 2008, he was a researcher and project lead at the European Media Lab (EML) in Heidelberg, Germany. Juergen’s main research interest is Internet technologies.

    Andrea Giessmann works as Research Associate in the SAP Research Center St. Gallen in Switzerland and is a 2nd year PhD student. Her PhD is focused on business models in cloud platforms. Before joining SAP she has obtained a Master of Science in Information Engineering and Management from the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT) in Germany and has worked a system analyst at ZF Friedrichshafen AG in Germany.

    Anna Gatzioura is a research engineer at the laboratory of Distributed Knowledge and Media Systems of the National Technical University of Athens. Her main research interests are cloud computing, selection and recommendation systems, decision making and optimization techniques. She received her Diploma of Electrical and Computer Engineering from the National Technical University of Athens, where she is currently pursuing her M.Sc. in Engineering-Economic Systems.

    Sergio Garcia Gomez, received his Bachelor degree in Telecommunication Engineering in 1999 and a Master in Project Management in 2007, both from the University of Valladolid. He has been working in Telefónica I+D since 2000, where he started working in network management systems (OSS/BSS) software development, including software design, development, architecture and coordination. He has participated in several innovation projects related to management systems, including subsidized projects (including FP5-AlbatrOSS, FP6-MEDSI, FP7-SLA@SOI and CELTIC-Servery), and internal innovative projects (Bayesian diagnosis of networks). He has actively participated in standardization activities in the TeleManagement Forum and holds several international publications. He has recently joined the Cloud Computing area, as Technical Coordinator of the FP7 Integrated Project 4CaaSt.

    Vrettos Moulos was born in Athens, Greece in 1983. He has obtained a Diploma in Information & Communication Systems Engineering from the Aegean University, an M.Sc. in Advanced Computing from Imperial College of London in 2007, another M.Sc. in Computing IT Law & Management from King’s College of London in 2008 and an M.Sc. in Techno-Economic Systems (MBA) co-organized by NTUA and University of Piraeus. He is a Ph.D. candidate in the department of Electrical and Computer Engineering of NTUA and is currently working as Research Associate and Software engineer. His research interests are mainly focused on the field of Anti Data Mining in Social Networks and Cloud Computing.

    Since 2011, Frederic Junker is completing his Ph.D. jointly as a PhD student at the University of St. Gallen and as a Research Associate at SAP Research Switzerland. Currently, he is involved in the EU FP7 project 4CaaSt. He holds an M.Sc. degree in computer science and business administration from the University of Mannheim, Germany. His research interest are Internet technologies, with the focus of his PhD being social enhancement of cloud computing.

    Mathias Müller is a Computer Engineer in SAP Research/ Université de Fribourg. His research interests are Software engineering, Object-oriented software development, RESTful Web Services and Multimodal interfaces.

    Dimosthenis Kyriazis is a Faculty Member at the University of Piraeus and Research Associate at the Institute of Communication and Computer Systems (ICCS) of the National Technical University of Athens (NTUA). He received his diploma from the school of Electrical and Computer Engineering of NTUA in 2001 and his MSc degree in “Techno-economics” in 2004. Since 2007, he holds a PhD in the area of Service Oriented Architectures with a focus on quality aspects and workflow management. Dimosthenis has participated in several EU and National funded projects leading research for addressing issues related to quality of service provisioning, fault tolerance, workflow management and performance modeling. He is currently focusing on virtualization technologies for high-availability in clouds and socially-enhanced techniques for IoT management—coordinating EU funded projects that target these areas, while also analyzing topics related to big data management and content syndication.

    Katarina Stanoevska-Slabeva is vice-director of the Institute for Media and Communications Management at the University of St. Gallen, Switzerland. She has received her PhD in Information Management at the University of St. Gallen. She has published more than 160 articles, conference papers and book chapters as well as five edited books. Her work has been published in JMM, EM and other journals. Her main research interest concerns business aspects of cloud computing, impact and application of Social Media, Mobile Communication and platform-based business models.

    Theodora A. Varvarigou received the B. Tech. degree from the National Technical University of Athens, Athens, Greece in 1988, the M.S. degrees in Electrical Engineering (1989) and in Computer Science (1991) from Stanford University, Stanford, California in 1989 and the Ph.D. degree from Stanford University as well in 1991. She worked at AT&T Bell Labs, Holmdel, New Jersey between 1991 and 1995. Between 1995 and 1997 she worked as an Assistant Professor at the Technical University of Crete, Chania, Greece. Since 1997 she was elected as an Assistant Professor while since 2007 she is a Professor at the National Technical University of Athens, and Director of the Postgraduate Course “Engineering Economics Systems”. Prof. Varvarigou has great experience in the area of semantic web technologies, scheduling over distributed platforms, embedded systems and grid computing.

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