H-CLOUD organized on 23 March 2021 a Technical Community Event for the European Cloud Scene. Participants included Cloud Computing projects funded under the European Union’s Horizon 2020 Research and Innovation Programme as well as other stakeholders from the Cloud ecosystem. The event was joined by Cloud Computing practitioners, describing related results from EU-funded research.
During the event, Dr. Olga Segou (INTRASOFT International) presented the Pledger approach for securing Cloud-Edge infrastructures. In this talk, Dr. Segou focused on Cyberattacks as a major threat not only to the integrity and availability of cloud infrastructures but also as a threat to the QoS guarantees that modern use cases require. Securing a dynamic environment where services can be instantiated and torn down in seconds, requiring the integration of multiple HW/SW platforms can be a challenge. Results from Intrusion Detection running on our infrastructure showed that our infrastructure was being targeted almost constantly. The first step to secure the infrastructure should be to complete a threat analysis. But in a complex and heterogeneous environment, it is often necessary to have a way to prioritise between threats and appropriate remediation measures, in order to harden the infrastructure and all its critical assets, and ensure that the Pledger platform performs its mission objectives even in a highly adversarial environment.
During the event, Gabriele Giammatteo (Engineering Ingegneria Informatica S.p.A.) presented the Pledger approach for optimize QoE in Cloud-Edge infrastructures. In this talk, Gabriele focused on the challenge that every service provider faces of choosing the best infrastructure provider to host her applications. Pledger supports service providers in making this decision by providing a way to predict the performance and the QoE/QoS achievable by their applications on different alternative infrastructure providers and suggesting the most appropriate one. Pledger implements an automated benchmarking of infrastructure providers that allows to measure several different system-level and application-level metrics on each provider. These metrics are then matched with the specific resource needs of the applications and suggestions are generated. This mechanism is integrated with runtime monitoring and SLA Management features that, all together, guarantee a stable and optimized QoE/QoS of the deployments managed through Pledger.
