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Provenance in the Cloud: Why and How?

Authors:
Muhammad Imran
Helmut Hlavacs

Keywords: provenance; research or open Clouds.

Abstract:
Provenance is an important aspect in the verification, audit trails, reproducibility, privacy and security, trust, and reliability in many fields ranging from art, food production, medical sciences, in-silico experiments, and distributed computing. On the other hand, Cloud computing is the business model of distributed computing and is considered the next generation of computing and storage platforms. Cloud computing requires an extension of the architecture of distributed and parallel systems by using virtualization techniques. Key to this extensible architecture is to support properties such as compute ``on demand'' and ``pay as you go'' model. Clouds are in use since a few years and they already expanded in the business domain (Amazon EC2, Microsoft Azure, IBM SmartCloud) and research environments (EUCALYPTUS, OpenNebula, Nimbus). Many research domains have already adopted Cloud technology into their existing computational and storage platforms and, thus, a shift of technology is in progress. In this paper, we present provenance description in computing sciences. Then, we give an overview of Cloud architecture and answer why provenance is important for Cloud computing. We introduce a mechanism to include provenance in the Cloud which requires minimal knowledge and understanding of underlying services and architecture. Therefore, we detail the importance along with the characteristics identified and present a framework for provenance in Cloud computing. We assure trust by augmenting a Cloud infrastructure with provenance collection in a structured way and present first performance results of the extended architecture. Finally, we discuss the results and summarize challenges and open issues of provenance in Clouds.

Pages: 106 to 112

Copyright: Copyright (c) IARIA, 2012

Publication date: July 22, 2012

Published in: conference

ISSN: 2308-4294

ISBN: 978-1-61208-216-5

Location: Nice, France

Dates: from July 22, 2012 to July 27, 2012