Monitoring, Tracking and Quantification of Quality of Service in Cloud Computing

Cloud computing has become a buzzword in computing circles now a days. Due to the attraction of cloud computing, it has attracted several service providers to the market in a very time. These cloud service providers have created a very competitive market for the customers to choose from. Due to the heavy competition, the cost of cloud services must be kept at a minimum in order to attract the sufficient number of customers. Also on the other hand, the service providers must assign as many customers as possible to a single physical system, so that the investment on these systems becomes profitable. When many customers are assigned to a single physical system, the Quality of services (QoS) of the cloud offerings would suffer. Hence it becomes necessary to monitor, track and quantify the QoS of the cloud systems in order to provide the right information to both customers and service providers. This information would help both customers and service providers in terms creating a match between them based on expectations and the capacity to meet them. This would increase the efficiency of the cloud systems by loading them to the optimum levels without sacrificing on the expected quality. Continuous monitoring would help to understand the behavior of the system in the short term and long term helping the service providers to take the necessary remedial actions soon. In this paper, the authors describe the research motivation, objectives, research questions, methodology adopted and significance of the PhD project carried out for developing a QoS monitoring, tracking and quantifying system. It also outlines the progress of the work so far along with the achievements.