Subject: [irtf-discuss] There will be a CSO coordination meeting in Quebec City

From: Leeyoung <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 13 Jul 2011 18:37:18 +0000

Hi,
 
There will be a CSO coordination meeting in Quebec City. We will update the research progress and discuss the charter draft this time around. 
Please visit the CSO wiki page to find the recent CSO workshop details and the presentation material. 
 
http://trac.tools.ietf.org/group/irtf/trac/wiki/csorg (CSO Wiki Page)
 
http://www.cccso.net/CSOWorkshopFinal.html (CSO Workshop Presentations) 
 
I'd like say thanks to Andrea, Nicola and Greg and NIng for providing great feedback/comments on the charter draft. Please review the current charter draft and give your feedback to the mailing list and/or come to the meeting. List below is the current charter draft. 
 
The date and room for the coordination meeting will be announced as soon as they are confirmed. Thanks. 
 
Best Regards,
Young
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1. Background
Cloud computing provides a variety of services allowing end-users, from individual to enterprises, to access to large pools of storage resources, computational resources and various application services, e.g., media content delivery.  There are many ways in which these services are provided to end-users, ranging from individual software applications to the allocation and use of thousands of raw computing entities which are geographically distributed around the world.  Data centers provide the physical and virtual infrastructure in which cloud computing applications and services are provided. 

Since both cloud computing and the data centers used to provide application services are distributed geographically around a network, many decisions made in the control and management planes of application services -- such as where to instantiate another service instance or which data center out of several a new client is assigned to, or moving a large quantity of data from a data center to another -- can have a significant impact on the state of the network. Conversely the capabilities and current state of the network can have a major impact on the application performance. 

Within a data center an application will make use of a number of types of computational resources such as memory, storage, computational elements (CPUs, cores, etc.) to provide services to its users. Such resources are constrained and come at a cost. Cost models for commercial computational offerings have become quite sophisticated and include advanced reservations, on demand capacity, and a spot market for currently unused resources. The ability for end users or data centers to communicate to other data centers is reliant on a network infrastructure whose resources are also constrained, e.g., links have finite capacity, and come at a cost. 
Currently application decisions are made with very little or no information concerning the underlying network used to deliver those services. Hence such decisions may be sub-optimal from both application and network resource utilization, and from the achievement of of quality of service objectives.  Among the top ten obstacles to the adoption of cloud computing identified according to Ambrust1et. al., over half have significant involvement of the network: 1. availability/business continuity; 3. data confidentiality and auditability; 4. data transfer bottlenecks; 5. performance unpredictability; 8. scaling quickly; 9. reputation fate sharing. 

As more applications and services are envisaged to be offered via cloud computing and data centers, it is critical to have an overall architectural model from both the application stratum and the network stratum points of view; define key interfaces among the entities involved in cloud computing, data centers and the networks supporting them; and provide next generation  architectures that integrate selected aspects of  cloud computing, data centers, and networks to improve service continuity, performance predictability/guarantees, scalability and manageability. 
Application management and control have grown in capability and sophistication enabling the optimization of both local and remote computing resources in response to dynamically changing operation environment (fluctuating loads, capacities, costs). Similarly, network control and management techniques such as DiffServ, MPLS-TE, GMPLS, and PCE have made it possible to provide performance assurance (e.g., bandwidth, latency) while providing for optimization of networks in response to dynamically changing network conditions (traffic load, node and link failures, planned maintenance, escalation of recovery procedures,  etc.). What is missing from these capabilities are mechanisms for both the application and network stratum to work together to better optimize the use of both computational and network resources, to provide better and tighter application performance guarantees, to respond more quickly and effectively to changing operational conditions.

2. Charter
The Cross Stratum Optimization (CSO) research group will investigate mechanisms for cooperation between application and network strata with regards to the availability, dynamic provisioning, quality of service, and reliability of large aggregates and individual flows of network traffic to and between data centers. By large flows we mean those that are significant with respect to core network link capacities, hence individual DSL or cable modem Internet user flows would be excluded from this work unless they can be aggregated and their aggregated traffic flow is significant with respect to core link capacities.
Initial areas of research include, but are not limited to:

1. Use cases, business models and requirements for cloud/network integration.
2. Development of a general baseline network/application reference architecture and key interfaces.
3. Development of virtualization/abstraction/summarization technique for representing both application and network resources.
4. Joint application/network resource allocation and re-allocation.
5. Coordinated monitoring of application and network resources status.
6. Shared response to quickly changing demands and conditions in both application and network strata.
7. Enhanced service resilience via cooperative recovery techniques between application and network.
8. Quality of application experience (QoE) enhancement.
9. Performance validation for network stability and joint optimization efficiency.
10. Multi-domain/multi-cloud service provider interaction including SLA monitoring, price, capacity planning mechanism.

3. Relationship to IETF Working Groups
The CSO research group will reuse many concepts from current and previous IETF working groups. The IETF working group current pursuing work closest to CSO is the ALTO working group. The ALTO working group, however, is concerned with optimizing the flows from individual Internet users, while CSO is concerned with the large flows either aggregated or between data centers. CSO envisions the network responding to notices of changes to large flows via techniques such as MPLS-TE or GMPLS.  

In defining the interfaces between the application and network stratum performance measures such as those developed by the IPPM working group will be relevant. In addition, interfaces that enable direct requests for services will take into account the kind of information exchanged via the RSVP-TE protocol as developed in the MPLS working group and extended in the CCAMP working group. Additionally, the PCEP protocol defined for requesting routes from a path computation element can serve as a reference model. Similarly any other topology information that may be shared would examine the traffic engineering and GMPLS extensions to link state routing protocols developed in CCAMP.

4. Membership
Open

5. Meetings
Co-location with tri-annual IETF meetings and open workshops at other places possibly.