Challenges and Opportunities in Improving Cloud Service Reliability and Availability

Speaker:        Professor Chunming QIAO
                IEEE Fellow
                CSE Department, SUNY Buffalo
                USA

Title:          "Challenges and Opportunities in Improving Cloud Service
                 Reliability and Availability"

Date:           Friday, 29 August 2014

Time:           3:00pm - 4:00pm

Venue:          Lecture Theater H (near lifts 27/28), HKUST

Abstract:

Cloud services may be disrupted by various failures ranging from very
frequent small scale failures (such as a few isolated individual
server/switch failures) to less frequent, yet non-negligible, large-scale
failures (such as rack or cluster failures). With our growing dependence
on cloud services for both commercial and personal use, their reliability
and availability have become increasingly critical. Despite existing
(mostly ad hoc) approaches to improving the cloud service reliability and
availability, a recent report found that on average, a service outage
lasts about 134 minutes, and these service outages cost about $426 billion
of loss worldwide annually. In addition, existing SLAs are often loosely
defined, and lack of reliability/availability guarantees has been cited as
the top concern over cloud services among IT professionals in a 2012
global survey. In this talk, I will discuss both the challenges and
opportunities related to service availability prediction, resource
provisioning, and SLA contract design from the perspective of cloud
service providers, and present our work on cost-effective solutions to
problems ranging from creating survivable virtual infrastructures in a
distributed multi-datacenter environment, to availability-aware VM
placement/allocation.


Biography:

Chunming Qiao directs the Lab for Advanced Network Design, Analysis, and
Research (LANDER) at SUNY Buffalo with current foci on cyber
transportation systems, cloud computing, and smartphone systems.

He has published extensively with an h-index of about 60 (according to
Google Scholar), and is among the Top 100 Authors in Computer Science,
Networks and Communications according to Microsoft Academic Ranking. Two
of his papers have received best paper award from IEEE and Joint ACM/IEEE
venues. He also has 7 US patents and served as a consultant for several IT
and Telecommunications companies since 2000. His research has been
featured in BusinessWeek, Wireless Europe, CBC and New Scientists. He has
given more than a dozen of keynotes, and numerous invited talks, chaired
and co-chaired a dozen of international conferences and workshops, and
served on the editorial board of several journals include IEEE
Transactions on Networks, and Transactions on TPDS. His research has been
funded by a dozen major IT and telecommunications companies including
Cisco and Google, and about a dozen NSF grants.  He has received several
awards including the recent SUNY Chancellor?s Award for Excellence in
Scholarship and Creative Activities; He was elected to IEEE Fellow for his
contributions to optical and wireless network architectures and protocols.