Benefits and Significance of Quality Aware Clouds
QoS of Cloud service providers has always been evolving and improving over time and is one of the primary discussion points in almost every gathering of Cloud service providers and practitioners. With the shift to Cloud computing around the world, researchers are keen to dig out the active and potential issues of quality of service that can affect the overall performance of a Cloud. Quality of service standards like Service Level Agreements (SLA) are of immense importance in the multifarious communication protocols of Cloud computing as they facilitate the end users, brokers and service providers to communicate across different Cloud based channels with ease and elevated productivity. QoS aware Clouds are being regarded as the need of the hour because of their augmented usability. Quality of service is the most decisive factor in the Cloud computing as it can build or tarnish the image of the service providers.
QoS was not paid the required heed at the start of the Cloud computing era because of the lack of research and practical approach to cope up the challenges. Later on, initiatives like Trusted and QoS Aware Provision of Application Services (TAPAS) and RESERVOIR were targeted to assure the quality of service of the SLA hosted applications which made the overall architecture of QoS extremely dependent upon the application frameworks. TAPAS introduced numerous middle ware services in the Cloud like JBOSS, Webshpere and J2EE quality standards to handle the quality of service issues.
Quality of service integration in the Cloud assures the SLA based performance optimization by implementing two monitoring protocols that can auto-detect the latency issues in the communication channels across the network. The first is monitoring service protocol which is responsible for all time monitoring of the communication between the SLA hosted application and the end user. If there is any delay or crash, the host is notified to re-configure the channel. The configuration part is handled by the configuration service (CS) protocol which has the sole responsibility to configure and smoothen up the kick start initiatives of the communication.
Quality aware Cloud solves the most teasing problems for the Cloud computing known as load balancing. Quality aware Cloud uses SLA policy engine which has a load balancer and service manager integrated. Whenever a request comes from the end user, the request is intercepted by the service manager and respective host is called. Upon the completion of the service, the result is parsed and sent back to the end user. All the activity is optimized using the time domain protocols to deplete the latency issues.
Practically simulated experiments have proved that quality aware Clouds can boost up the productivity of a Cloud up to 80%. Load balancing, maximum time allocation policies and error handling are the major benefits of quality aware Clouds that are a pinching factor behind the tilt of experts towards this amazing domain of Cloud computing.
By Salman UI Haq
