The environment of any component of a Cloud Computing system is subject to continuous evolution. To maintain service availability while satisfying economic constraints, Cloud Computing systems must dynamically adapt to such changes. Adaptation may involve several components and require complex interaction protocols. The key difficulty lies in coordinating the adaptation of different components. The project goal is to develop a flexible infrastructure for smart and coordinated dynamic reconfiguration of Cloud Computing systems. Formal Methods techniques will be used to allow explicit specification of the structural and behavioural constraints of the system to provide formal correctness guarantees and allow proactive adaptivity in a coordinated manner. Distributed monitoring and online optimisation techniques will be used for dynamic adaptation, aiming to optimise the efficiency of resource usage in a scalable manner.

Project objectives

The SmartCloud project aims to develop a flexible infrastructure for designing smart and coordinated dynamic adaptation frameworks for Cloud Computing systems. In particular, we aim at

• a new formalism for joint modelling of platform and application aspects of Cloud Computing systems, allowing developers to specify the structural, behavioural, and availability constraints explicitly and providing monitoring, coordination and control mechanisms for dynamic adaptation
• new algorithms and heuristics for distributed online optimisation, utilising these mechanisms to optimise availability and resource usage efficiency in a scalable manner