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Cloud federation is an emerging computing model where multiple resources from independent cloud providers are leveraged to create large-scale distributed virtual computing clusters, operating as within a single cloud organisation. This concept of service aggregation is characterised by interoperability features, which can address different problems about inter-cloud collaboration. One of the main issues within a cloud federation is related to the monitoring of the application deployed on resources coming from different vendors belonging to the federation. We present an agent-based architecture that aims at monitoring the user's cloud environment provided by the federation: the elasticity of the proposed architecture allows the configuration and customisation of the monitoring infrastructure to adapt it to the specific cloud application. Agents will be strengthened by algorithms and rules used to monitor QoS parameters that are critical for the specific application. The prototypal implementation of the proposed framework will be applied on a testbed application to validate the monitoring architecture.

The increasing demand for energy has stimulated the formulation of plans aiming at shifting to renewable energies, not only to save money, but also for the responsibility that the present population has towards future generations. Under this aspect, ICT-based solutions can be used to enable energy and money saving not only for a single building, but for the whole community of a neighbourhood. In this paper, we present an agent-based framework that allows the management and negotiation of decentralised energy production. We propose a P2P overlay network whereby the agents distributed within the community can negotiate the energy in a transparent way with respect to the different technologies used, thus, ensuring scalability of the overall architecture. We analyse the performance of the proposed solution in different scenarios by using a set of testbeds developed to evaluate the prototypal implementation of the framework and of the communication network.

—In the last years, the Cloud services market experienced an extremely rapid growth, which may lead to severe scalability problems. Therefore, in order to cope with the resource capacity limits of a single Cloud provider, as well as to address the vendor lock-in problem associated to the choice of a single proprietary Cloud solution, the concept of federating multiple heterogeneous organizations is receiving an increasing attention by the key players in the Cloud services market; this model enables the implementation of environmental diversity for Cloud applications and overcomes the provisioning and scalability limits of a single Cloud. One of the main issues within a Cloud federation is related to the monitoring of the application deployed on resources coming from different vendors belonging to the federation. In this work we present an agent based approach to monitor the user’s Cloud environment provided by the federation: a multi-layer architecture is proposed where each part aims at monitoring different aspects of the multi-Cloud infrastructure, starting from the detection of critical conditions on low level parameters for the computational units and composing different monitoring levels in order to check the federated SLA.

In order to overcome the provisioning and scalability limits of a single cloud, cloud federation appears as the computing model in which multiple resources from independent cloud providers can be shared to create large-scale distributed virtual clusters. On the other hand, these complex architectures become an attractive target for distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks. Although, federated cloud environments have large amount of resources and profound dynamic allocation capability, which can be used to face DDoS attacks, they are however vulnerable to attacks that aim at compromising the service level agreements. In this paper, we investigate the key research topics for supporting distributed intrusion detection in a federated cloud environment. We propose a scalable intrusion detection solution, which can be used by cloud providers to protect the federated cloud infrastructure, as well as offered to the cloud service providers to monitor the hosted applications. We present a multi-layer architecture, which exploits a publish/subscribe middleware to collect and share security information in the federated cloud infrastructure. Moreover, we present an open-source framework, which provides features and interfaces to develop and deploy security components, as well as to define customised event correlation rules used to detect possible inter-cloud attacks.

The monitoring of the resources is one among the major challenges that the virtualization brings with it within the Cloud environments. In order to ensure scalability and dependability, the user's applications are often distributed on several computational resources, such as Virtual Machines, storages and so on. For this reason, the customer is able to retrieve information about the Cloud infrastructure only by acquiring monitoring services provided by the same vendor that is offering the Cloud resources, thus being forced to trust the Cloud provider about the detected performance indexes. In this work we present a complete architecture that covers all the monitoring activities that take place within a Cloud application lifecycle: we also propose an agent-based implementation of a particular module of the designed architecture that ensures high customization of the monitoring facility and more tolerance to network and resource failures.

The increasing demand for energy has stimulated the formulation of plans aiming at shifting to renewable energies, not only to save money, but also for the responsibility that the present population has towards future generations. Within this scenario, ICT solutions will help the citizens in saving energy: people of a community that have power’s over-production can take benefits in terms of gain by selling the excess energy to neighbourhood instead of power suppliers due to the fees that they have to pay in the latter case. On the other hand, citizens that need additional energy can buy it from sellers in the neighbourhood at favorable prices. In this paper we present an agent-based framework that allows the collection of data about energy consumption in a neighbourhood and the negotiation of the whole produced/consumed energy among the involved parties in order to maximize the profits of the community.

The Cloud paradigm has largely been adopted in several different contexts and applied to an incredibly large set of technologies. It is an opportunity for IT users to reduce costs and increase efficiency providing an alternative way of using IT services. It represents both a technology for using computing infrastructures in a more efficient way and a business model for selling computing resources. It gives to small and medium enterprises the possibility of using services and technologies that were prerogative of large ones, by paying only for the resources needed and avoiding upfront investment. The possibility of dynamically acquire and use resources and services on the base of a pay-per-use model, implies incredible flexibility in terms of management, which is otherwise often hard to address. On the other hand, because of this flexibility new problems emerge, which involve the evaluation and monitoring of the quality of the acquired resources and services. This chapter presents a survey on the solutions and technologies proposed by research and open community to face such issues.

In the last years, the cloud services market has experienced an extremely rapid growth, as reported in several market research reports, which may lead to severe scalability problems. Therefore, federating multiple clouds is enjoying a lot of attention from the academic and commercial point of views. In this context, publish-subscribe is a widely used paradigm to support the interoperability of federated clouds. In this paper, we describe some potential vulnerabilities of a publish-subscribe based federated cloud system. In particular, we propose an agent-based system that aims at monitoring security vulnerabilities that affect such kind of inter-cloud cooperation solutions.

Cloud Federation is an emerging computing model where multiple resources from independent Cloud providers are leveraged to create large-scale distributed vir- tual computing clusters, operating as within a single Cloud organization. This model enables the implementation of environmental diversity for Cloud applications, and overcomes the provisioning and scalability limits of a single Cloud, by introducing minimal additional cost for the Cloud consumer. In such a scenario, it is necessary to leverage specific middleware technologies that enable the effective support of inter- Cloud communication services between Cloud providers. This paper proposes an interconnection solution for Cloud Federations based on publish-subscribe services.

Within the Cloud application life cycle, Cloud monitoring takes an important role since the fulfilment of the requirements has to be continuously controlled in order to avoid saturation or under-utilisation of Cloud resources and to check the compliance of the signed SLAs with the real performance of the infrastructure. In fact, to ensure scalability and dependability, the user's applications are often distributed on several computational resources, such as virtual machines, storages and so on, and the customer often is able to retrieve information about the Cloud infrastructure only by acquiring monitoring services provided by the same vendor that is offering the Cloud resources. In this work we present a complete framework that covers all the monitoring activities that take place within a Cloud application life cycle, introducing autonomic monitoring facilities that, exploiting the agent technology capabilities, allows the monitoring infrastructure to automatically adapt itself to the execution environment. These facilities provide both robustness and performance control to the framework, reducing the invasiveness of the monitoring and allowing, only if necessary, a deeper analysis of the measured data.

Cloud Computing represents both a technology for using computing infrastructures in a more efficient way, and a business model for selling computing resources and services. On the other hand, such complex and distributed architectures become an attractive target for intruders. Cyber-attacks represent a serious danger, which can compromise the quality of service delivered to the customers. In this paper, we investigate the key research topics for supporting distributed intrusion detection in Cloud environments. Moreover, we present a distributed architecture for providing intrusion detection in Cloud Computing, which enables Cloud providers to offer security solutions as a service. It is a hierarchical and multi-layer architecture designed to collect information in the Cloud environment, using multiple distributed security components, which can be used to perform complex event correlation analysis.

When service providers move to IAAS Clouds, whether their service is delivered by a legacy application, either it has been developed by a deployable open platform, the provisioning and the management workflow of the computing infrastructure really changes. Here we describe a set of tools which can be used to orchestrate agents’ based services, which provide facilities for provisioning, management and monitoring of Clouds. The user is able to discover, allocate, configure and monitor Cloud services at infrastructure level through an approach that is agnostic respect to the specific Cloud vendor or to the Cloud technology.

Monitoring of resources is one among the major challenges that the virtualization brings with it within the Cloud environment since the user applications are often distributed on several nodes whose location is unknown a priori and can dynamically change. Consumers need to monitor their resources for checking that service levels are continuously compliant with the agreed SLA and for detecting under-utilization or overloading conditions of their resources. Furthermore the monitoring of service levels becomes critical because of the conflicts of interest that might occur between provider and customer in case of outage. In this paper a framework that supports the monitoring of Cloud infrastructure is presented. It provides to the user the possibility to check the state of his/her resources, even if they have been acquired from heterogeneous vendors. The proposed environment will offer high elasticity and extensibility by the provisioning of an high level of customization of the performance indexes and metrics.

In the Cloud context, the monitoring of service levels becomes critical because of the conflicts of interest that might occur between provider and customer in case of outage. Here we focus on Cloud monitoring at infrastructure level (IaaS), but with the perspective of a Cloud customer. Cloud customers cannot check the compliance of the Service Level Agreement (SLA) trusting the monitoring service of their own Cloud provider. In fact the Cloud provider has a conflicting interest ensuring the guarantees on service levels it provides. Besides Cloud customers need to detect under-utilization and overload conditions to take decisions about load balancing and resource reconfiguration. In this paper we present an agency that is deployed in the Cloud together with the customer's applications and can be used to configure a monitoring infrastructure. Mobile software agents take measures inside the Cloud resources, which are completely under the customer's administration, collect performance information and compute metrics according to the user's requirements. They implement a provider independent monitoring of the Cloud infrastructure during the execution of applications.

Cloud computing represents an opportunity for IT users to reduce costs and increase efficiency providing an alternative way of using IT services. In this scenario value added services for dynamic and elastic provisioning play an important role, by giving the possibility to get the best resources configuration that satisfies the application requirements. Agent technology provides asynchronous mechanisms that could represent the best choice for effective programming of Cloud, due to the unpredictable behaviour of the network. Cloud Agency is a collection of agent based services for provisioning, monitoring and autonomic reconfiguration of Cloud resources at infrastructure level, which go beyond the common offer by commercial providers and by open Cloud technologies. In this work we describe how Cloud Agency extends the Open Cloud Computing Interface (OCCI\cite{OCCICORE}) proposal of standard for the Cloud infrastructures level. We present the Cloud agency design and the implementation of an Restful to/from ACL gateway that allows for the communication between the Cloud world and the agents' one, being compliant with OCCI and extending its model and services.

Cities are increasingly recognized for their ability to play a catalytic role in addressing climate and energy chal- lenges using technologically innovative approaches. Since en- ergy used in urban areas accounts for about 40% of total EU energy consumption, a change of direction towards re- newable energy is necessary in order to alleviate the usage of carbonized electricity and also to save money. A combina- tion of IT and telecommunication technologies is necessary to enable the energy and resources saving. ICT based so- lutions can be used to enable energy and money saving not only for a single building, but for the whole community of a neighborhood. In this paper a model for the energy cost minimization of a neighborhood together with an agent-based interaction model that reproduces the proposed formal rep- resentation is presented. Furthermore the authors present a prototype implementation of this model and first experimen- tal tests.