How to Monitor QoS in Cloud Infrastructures: The QoSMONaaS Approach

Cloud computing provides a new paradigm to enable on-demand delivery of computing resources such as infrastructure, platforms and software as utilities to customers. When moving applications and/or data in the cloud, numerous challenges exist in leveraging the full potential that cloud computing promises. In this paper we address the challenging issue of QoS monitoring in a cloud environment. The availability of a dependable (i.e. reliable and timely) QoS monitoring facility is key for the real take up of cloud computing, since - by allowing organizations to receive the full value of cloud computing services - it would increase the level of trust they would place in this emerging technology. In this paper, we present a dependable QoS monitoring facility which relies on the "as a Service" paradigm, and can thus be made available to virtually all cloud users in a seamless way. Such a facility is called QoSMONaaS, which stands for "Quality of Service MONitoring as a Service". Details are given about the internal design and current implementation of the proposed facility.