Home // International Journal On Advances in Intelligent Systems, volume 6, numbers 1 and 2, 2013 // View article

Provenance Framework for the Cloud Infrastructure: Why and How?

Authors:
Muhammad Imran
Helmut Hlavacs

Keywords: provenance, middleware, cloud.

Abstract:
Provenance is an important aspect in the verification, audit trails, reproducibility, privacy and security, trust, and reliability in distributed computing, in-silico experiment and generally in e-science. 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. Many research domains have already adopted Cloud paradigm into their existing computational and storage platforms and, thus, a shift of technology is in progress. In this paper, we give an overview of Cloud architecture and the importance of provenance in Cloud computing. We provide the mechanism for the collection of the provenance data while addressing the challenges offered by this new paradigm. These challenges include mainly the abstraction, high scalability and the inability to modify or extend the Cloud services. We provide a framework that requires minimal knowledge and understanding of underlying services and architecture of a Cloud. We assure trust by augmenting a Cloud infrastructure with provenance collection in a structured way. Then, we present the architectural overview of the provenance framework and the performance results of the extended architecture. The experimental results show that our provenance framework has a very low computation overhead (less than milliseconds), which makes it a good fit for the Cloud infrastructure.

Pages: 112 to 123

Copyright: Copyright (c) to authors, 2013. Used with permission.

Publication date: June 30, 2013

Published in: journal

ISSN: 1942-2679