Cloud Computing: Principles and Paradigms

Chapter 7. ENHANCING CLOUD COMPUTING ENVIRONMENTS USING A CLUSTER AS A SERVICE

MICHAEL BROCK and ANDRZEJ GOSCINSKI

INTRODUCTION

The emergence of cloud computing has caused a significant change in how IT infrastructures are provided to research and business organizations. Instead of paying for expensive hardware and incur excessive maintenance costs, it is now possible to rent the IT infrastructure of other organizations for a minimal fee.

While the existence of cloud computing is new, the elements used to create clouds have been around for some time. Cloud computing systems have been made possible through the use of large-scale clusters, service-oriented architecture (SOA), Web services, and virtualization.

While the idea of offering resources via Web services is commonplace in cloud computing, little attention has been paid to the clients themselves—specifically, human operators. Despite that clouds host a variety of resources which in turn are accessible to a variety of clients, support for human users is minimal.

Proposed in this chapter is the Cluster as a Service (CaaS), a Web service for exposing via WSDL and for discovering and using clusters to run jobs.^[20] Because the WSDL document is the most commonly exploited object of a Web service, the inclusion of state and other information in the WSDL document makes the internal activity of the Web services publishable. This chapter offers a cloud higher layer abstraction and support for users. From the virtuahzation point of view the ...