Cloud and Networking Infrastructure Management

We are witnessing a paradigm shift in computing—people are increasingly using Web-based software for tasks that only a few years ago were carried out using software running locally on their computers. The increasing use of mobile devices, which typically have limited processing power, is catalyzing the idea of offloading computations to the cloud.

This research has discovered that the virtualization layer presents many vulnerabilities in the cloud. By exploiting these vulnerabilities, a hacker could gain access to several different clients’ data that are managed by the same cloud service provider or hypervisor. Additionally, there are several cyber-attacks and techniques used to bypass security in the virtualization layer. This study illustrated how the virtual layer works in cloud computing and recommended remediation techniques to help security for cloud-facing infrastructure.

Accordingly, this dissertation contributes to enhancing the security of SDN infrastructure in cloud data centers. It first investigates how SDN introduces new timing attack vectors which can be exploited by adversaries. However, maliciously leveraging these new attack vectors is a challenging process. While this dissertation studies these challenges, it also investigates how they can be used in a successful defense mechanism against time inference attacks in SDN.

This dissertation designs and implements a new architectural element called a cloudlet, that arises from the convergence of mobile computing and cloud computing. Cloudlets represent the middle tier of a 3-tier hierarchy, mobile device - cloudlet - cloud, to achieve the right balance between cloud consolidation and network responsiveness.

This dissertation addresses two important platforms in cloud infrastructures: the containers and the Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) platforms. The main contribution of this dissertation is the proposal of an approach inspired by the exokernel architecture that can be generalized to any multi-tenant system to improve security, flexibility, and efficiency. This approach is called the exokernel approach — a principle of separating protection and management.

In this dissertation, we focus on studying storage resource management for both SSD-HDD hybrid and all-flash storage systems, and investigating storage optimization for big data platforms. We aim to achieve high availability of storage capacity and accessibility by improving both performance and reliability in these storage systems

The primary goals of the framework are to enable the development of such applications to be more rapid, efficient, reliable, and straightforward. Smart-Cloud consists of a novel combination of reusable components that includes API's, services, and application framework. These components were designed and developed using cutting-edge architectural styles, best practices, and patterns such as the microservices architectural style and the twelve-factor-app. The framework adopts the metadata-driven design to enable dynamic and static generation of single artifacts, end-to-end features, and full applications. Moreover, it consists of a cloud-based platform that utilizes the model-driven development approach to enable the use of the framework without writing code. The framework also follows the software product lines approach of enabling users to develop new projects efficiently.

In our proposed work, we study two architectures which can be used to store and retrieve the scientific data. Firstly, we studied the Resources Allocation of Virtualized Cloud Infrastructure (RA-VCI) problem. In the RA-VCI problem, we used a multi-layer optical network as a network infrastructure to receive the user demands and move the data across the cloud. Secondly, we study the use of Named Data Networking (NDN) as a replacement for the current HTTP protocol to retrieve the scientific data software. Thirdly, we use both SDN and NDN to enhance scientific data transfer and management. SDN will enable multi-path data retrieval from on-path and off-path caches. Finally, we benefit from the centralized control of SDN to implement a distributed cache management using NDN. This cache management helps in caching the large files across the NDN routers.