Essay Questions for ‘Cloud Computing and Service Management’
Write short essay (8-10 pages) on one of the questions below, with 30 minutes
seminar presentation to Prof. Leymann/Prof. Mitschang
If 2 or more students cooperate, each individual contribution needs to be easily
identifiable. Questions:
1. Breiter: Describe the concepts of a Common Cloud Management Platform
Reference Architecture (CCMP RA) and discuss its value. Give a brief
overview of the CCMP RA - what are the technical workproducts (TWPs)
which the RA contains. Briefly describe the TWPs. Highlight some examples
of Cloud Services which can be managed by the CCMP RA.
2. Schlatter: With Hybrid Clouds the question is no longer "To Cloud or not to
Cloud", i.e., the question is no longer only what workloads are suitable, or not
suitable for the Cloud. Instead, enterprises must solve multi-dimensional
optimization problems: what should they build and host themselves, in
traditional IT or in on-premise private cloud environments, and what should
they get from which of the various off-premise IaaS, PaaS, or SaaS cloud
service providers.
a. Describe an imaginary example of that optimization problem:
b. What is the goal function, i.e., what is to be achieved? What should be
maximized, what should be minimized? Give examples of both
quantitative and qualitative measures.
c. What are the constraints? Think of examples of non-functional
requirements that may have to be met in a given situation, and that
may limit the degrees of freedom.
d. What are the decision variables, i.e., what are the Points-of-Variability,
what needs to be decided? Give examples of the cloud service
characteristics that need to be taken into account.
3. Kloeckner: Discuss the importance of multi-tenancy for clouds, and the
various ways of achieving it in the layers from Virtualization to Middleware.
Discuss security and performance concerns, discuss billing/metering.
Describe at least one layer in detail (for instance, discuss implementation for
database)
4. Kloeckner: Relaxed consistency – discuss the various approaches described
in the papers of Hohpe, Vogels and others. Advantages, disadvantages.
Discuss one implementation in detail (for instance, persistence or messaging
with examples like Dynamo, Cassandra or SQS).
5. Kloeckner: Discuss the properties of content-centric applications with an indepth description of Hadoop and its applications, compare to Google
6. Kloeckner: In-depth description and analysis of MS Azure, describe choices
for the PaaS services (consistency etc.)
7. Kloeckner: Discuss warehouse scale computing, pros and cons of commodity
infrastructure - Barroso/Hoelzl
8. Kloeckner – Discuss the main considerations for performance of clouds. Look
at the system aspects, in particular storage and networking bandwidth. Take
an example use case/task (like provisioning virtual machines of various
sizes) and discuss alternatives for implementation
9. Kloeckner – Discuss the major elements of cloud economics (including
references like ‘Above the Clouds’)
10. Breh - What are the approaches to adopt the cloud computing concepts ?
a. Discuss the approaches considering cultural and organizational
aspects?
b. What are the potential integration points of cloud processes into an
enterprise?
c. Why are they important?
11. Noll: Storage
a. What are the requirements/goals for consumers and for providers of
storage services in a cloud environment?
b. What are the benefits of storage virtualization and what are the prerequisites of using storage virtualization?
c. Describe the main functional areas needed for storage management in
cloud environments.
12. Schunter: Security
1 - Pick a company that offers well-defined services over the Internet
2 - Pick at most 3 services and perform a security risk analysis of
implementing these services on an infrastructure cloud (e.g. Amazon)
3 - Pick one service and elaborate the security objectives, risks
and whether you would accept (why?) or mitigate (how?) those risks
4 - Deciding whether you go cloud or not at a certain point in time..
13. Michael Behrendt – Cloud Service Creation
a. Describe how to create a cloud service along the "12 steps" by using
an example of your choice. Include considerations & decisions made at
each step.
b. Creating cloud services -- discuss the role of runtime and management
functions, their relationship and motivations for consuming them as
hosted offerings vs. installing them on-premise
c. Discuss considerations to be made for defining the management scope in the
context of creating a cloud service