Coordinating Complex Interactions in Distributed Cloud Applications

Abstract

Beneath the popular term 'The Cloud' reveals a disruptive technology that is changing the status quo of traditional software structures and development into the next evolutionary step of distributed computing. Indeed, with this 'Cloud' web applications now have the potential to run on vastly improved resources compared to a those available to them a decade ago. More importantly, these applications now have the ability to provide richer functional interactions hitherto unrealized by running them on isolated computers. One of the main concerns in the design of these applications is how the di?erent modules found in an application are able to interact and cooperate with each other in order to perform a task. This distributed coordination is vital in Cloud-based applications as it is involved with the management of a large number of actual users and tasks common in such structures. We present our research into ways in which complex interactions can be coordinated in Cloud-based applications and services. We identify two major areas in coordinating such systems. Distributed event composition is the detection of simple events from di?erent parts of a distributed application, creating a single, composed and collaborative event that summarizes their significance. Group coordination is the ability to orchestrate the behaviour of distributed software entities in a conceptual group of interest. In this work we propose the Mingo framework for coordinating complex interactions in Cloud-based applications and services using techniques from complex event processing. The framework uses abstractions for the group coordination and for composition of complex events using declarative rules. Through this we find that the flexibility of defining these rules allows the developer to focus on coordination at a higher level, for instance defining and developed advanced coordination techniques that were previously more di cult to achieve. With this, we see that Mingo can have a greater impact in the general domain of coordination, and in particular the area of coordinating Cloud-based applications and services.

Date of Award	17 Aug 2012
Original language	English
Supervisor	Wolfgang De Meuter (Promotor) & Lode Hoste (Advisor)