In hosting environments such as Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) clouds, desirable application performance is typically guaranteed through the use of Service Level Agreements (SLAs), which specify minimal fractions of resource capacities that must be allocated by a service provider for unencumbered use by customers to ensure proper operation of their workloads. Most IaaS offerings are presented to customers as fixed-size and fixed-price SLAs, that do not match well the needs of specific applications. Furthermore, arbitrary colocation of applications with different SLAs may result in inefficient utilization of hosts' resources, resulting in economically undesirable customer behavior. In this thesis, we propose the design and architecture of a Colocation as a Service (CaaS) framework: a set of strategic and operational services that allow the efficient colocation of customer workloads. CaaS strategic services provide customers the means to specify their application workload using an SLA language that provides them the opportunity and incentive to take advantage of any tolerances they may have regarding the scheduling of their workloads. CaaS operational services provide the information necessary for, and carry out the reconfigurations mandated by strategic services. We recognize that it could be the case that there are multiple, yet functionally equivalent ways to express an SLA. Thus, towards that end, we present a service that allows the provably-safe transformation of SLAs from one form to another for the purpose of achieving more efficient colocation. Our CaaS framework could be incorporated into an IaaS offering by providers or it could be implemented as a value added proposition by IaaS resellers. To establish the practicality of such offerings, we present a prototype implementation of our proposed CaaS framework.

BackgroundUtilizing the Software as a Service (SaaS) business model is a distinct trend for marketing softwarevia the Internet. It allows software suppliers to expand their market globally and to extend theiroffering to customers by simplifying their software procurements and ownerships. The trend has beenongoing for some time concerning horizontal software niches and now intensifies for vertical niches.Logistics is such an examples of a vertical software niche. ObjectivesThis thesis aims to investigate the utilized marketing strategies for companies using a Software as aService business model within the logistics niche. The purpose of this thesis is to deepen theknowledge about how to market a vertical Software as a Service solution within the logistics domain. MethodologyAn explorative research method in the form of a multiple case study is used. Three companies aresampled using a theoretical sampling approach. SaaS ideally requires less people contact and themarketing materials are integrated in the published SaaS on the respective companies’ web pages.Data publicly available on the Internet is collected and used to investigate the utilized marketingstrategies. FindingsThe identified marketing strategies are categorized according to an eight-element model utilized inearlier studies. The eight elements are product, price, place, promotion, people, process, productivity& quality, and physical environment. The categorization does help to guide during data collections anddata analysis. The last element physical environment is confirmed to be not relevant since the requiredphysical material are chosen and decided by customers themselves. ConclusionsThe marketing strategies within this niche is at large consistent with earlier findings. One of the newlyfindings is that the sample companies choose one of SaaS strong points that is most suitable to theiroffering solution and emphasize it in their marketing strategies. Here are easiness, scalability andflexibility. Some main deviations however exist. The sample companies do not provide easilyavailable trial accounts. They instead offer manned online demonstrations. The market is also notfound to be as global as the business model enables. The reason of being that is the fact that theproducts/services are too dependent on the integrations to local-market software solutions. Recommendations for future researchA similar study with a larger sample may strengthen the findings. Performing interviews in addition toonline data collection may extend more information about post customer contact marketing strategiesas well as reasons behind the selected strategies.

Systems for automated evaluation of assignments are a valuable aid for both teachers of programming courses and their students. The objective of this thesis is to examine the possibilities of deploying such systems in a large-scale distributed environment and the challenges of such endeavors. A sizable part of the requirements comes from experience with ReCodEx - an assignment evaluation system developed at the department of the supervisor. Modern server multi-core processors provide considerable computing power that can be used for assignment evaluation. However, parallel measurements can interfere with each other. This causes unstable results, which detriments the fairness of grading. Isolation (sandboxing) technologies can cause similar effects. We measure both of these influences and use the results to determine to what degree can multi-core processors be exploited. The problem of efficient distribution of work between multiple evaluation workers is complementary to that of utilizing multi-core machines. We survey scheduling algorithms and design an experiment to compare their performance. Additionally, we examine the possibility of leveraging container technologies to simplify the deployment of software required for evaluation. This leads to both a smaller administration overhead and a less complex...

Cloud computing is a new buzzword in the modern information technology world. Today cloud computing can be considered as a service, similar to the way that electricity is considered a service in urban areas. A cloud user can utilize different computing resources (e.g. network, storage, software application), whenever required, without being concerned with the complex underlying technology and infrastructure architecture. The most important feature is that the computing resources are available whenever they are needed. Additionally, users pay only for the resource they actually use. As a result, cloud users can easily scale their information technology infrastructure, based on their business policy and requirements. This scalability makes the business process more agile. The motivation for this thesis was the need for a suitable set of security guidelines for ifoodbag (and similar companies) when implementing web applications in the cloud. The goal of this thesis is to provide security in a system, being developed in another Master’s thesis project, to implement the ifoodbag web application in a cloud. To achieve this goal, we began by identifying the risks, threats, and vulnerabilities in the system model proposed by these other students for their implementation. A study was made of several different security mechanisms that might reduce or eliminate risks and secure the most vulnerable points in the proposed system’s design. Tests of these alternatives were conducted to select a set of mechanisms that could be applied to the proposed system’s design. Justification for why these specific mechanisms were selected is given. The tests allowed the evaluation of how each of these different security mechanisms affected the performance of the system. This thesis presents the test results and their analysis. From this analysis a set of mechanisms were identified that should be included in the prototype of the system. In conclusion, we found that DNSSEC, HTTPS, VPN, AES, Memcached with SASL authentication, and elliptic curve cryptography gave the most security, while minimizing the negative impact on the system. Additionally, client & server mutual authentication and a multi-level distributed database security policy were essential to provide the expected security and privacy that users would expect under the Swedish Data Protection law and other laws and regulations. / Molntjänster är något nytt inom informationsteknikens värld, som kan idag kan liknas vid hur folk i stadsområden köper sin el. Människor som använder sig av molntjänster kan dela och använda olika data (t.ex. olika nätverk, lagringsutrymme och programvara) utan att ha djupare kunskaper om den bakomliggande, komplexa tekniken eller om infrastrukturens uppbyggnad. Den viktigaste egenskapen hos molntjänster är hur man kan dela och komma åt den dator man behöver när man vill och betalar bara för den dator man använder. Molntjänster har resulterat i att företag enkelt kan anpassa sin informationsteknikens-infrastruktur baserat på de policys och krav företaget har. Motiveringen för denna avhandling är att det behövs lämpliga riktlinjer för företag som t.ex. iFoodBag (och liknande företag) vid integrering av webbapplikationer i molntjänster. Målet för denna avhandling är att ge stabilitet och säkerhet i systemet iFoodBag, ett program som är gjort i ett annat examensarbete. För att uppnå målet började vi med att identifiera risker, hot och sårbarheter i programmets modell och uppbyggnad i det andra examensarbetet. Med en efterföljande undersökning tittade vi på hur flera olika säkerhetsmekanismer antingen minskade eller eliminerade riskerna och såg även på de mest sårbara punkterna i det föreslagna programmets utformning. Med resultaten från denna undersökning genomförde vi tester för att välja vilka mekanismer som skulle fungera bäst med programmet. Motiveringen till varför vi valde dessa mekanismer är baserad på testerna och våran utvärdering av dessa. Vi valde säkerhetsmekanismer baserat på hur de påverkade prestandan i programmet. Denna avhandling presenterar testresultaten och analyserna av dessa. Genom att studera alla resultat valde vi ut de säkerhetsmekanismer som skulle fungera bäst i prototyp-programmet. Sammanfattningsvis kom vi fram till att DNSSEC, HTTPS, VPN och AES, Memcached med SASL autentisering, och elliptisk kurva kryptografi gav högst säkerhet med minst negativ påverkat på programmet. I tillägg såg vi att klient-server ömsesidig autentisering, och flera nivåer databas säkerhetspolicy var nödvändiga för att tillgodose de förväntningarna användare har på programmet när det gäller säkerhet och integritet i enighet med Svenska dataskyddslagstiftningar och andra lagar och förordningar.

Scholarly reviews expound that current prevailing on-premise Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) systems could not be sufficient for enterprises to form highly dynamic units around vibrant requirements of the market. In response to satisfying ever-changing demands of the market, cloud computing has been recently emerged which its basic promise is convergence of IT efficiency and business agility in information technology. Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) is the most common type of cloud service which has been heralded to be a serious alternative for on-premise software. Considering shortages of current on-premise ERPs and high potentiality of SaaS to be as an alternative for on-premise software, this study seeks to empirically understand real advantages and disadvantages of adopting ERP systems served as SaaS from the perspective of SaaS users. "Real advantages and disadvantages" in this study are the ones which are not only certified through literature but also through empirical data. Grounded in literature review and personal communication with two Information Systems (IS) professionals, 19 items were considered as advantages and 12 items as disadvantages of ERP as SaaS adoption categorized in three groups of strategic, financial, and technical. Survey data of 90 responses were collected and analyzed out of 212 contacts with industry experts in different types of business and sizes of the enterprise in Sweden through nonprobability sampling. By application of Non-parametric test, our data analysis revealed that users of ERP as SaaS believed in five real advantages in adoption of ERP as SaaS while they did not agree with any real disadvantages in such adoption. They accepted that adoption of ERP as SaaS a) helps users to run their business more globally, b) enhances users’ business to go mobile, c) reduces large up-front investment of users on resource provision, d) saves technology costs, and e) helps users not to be concerned about management and maintenance of the ERP as SaaS. Moreover, our final results showed that majority of every enterprise size do not have plan of adopting ERP as SaaS in the future. Based on the findings, detailed discussion will be given about social consequences of the results and underlying reasons which could have impact on recognition of few real advantages and no real disadvantages in this study.

The number of IoT devices and their respective data is increasing for each day impacting the traditional architecture model of solely using the cloud for processing and storage in a negative way. This model may therefore need a supporting model to alleviate the different challenges for future IoT applications. Several researchers have described and presented algorithms and models with focus on distributed architecture models. The main issues with these however is that they fall short when it comes to the implementation and distribution of tasks. The former issue is that they are not implemented on actual hardware but simulated in a constrained environment. The latter issue is that they are not considering sharing a single task but to distribute a whole task. The objective of this thesis is therefore to present the different challenges regarding the traditional architecture model, investigate the research gap for the IoT and the different computing paradigms. Together with this implementing and evaluating a future architecture model capable of collaboration for the completion of a generated task on multiple off-the-shelf hardware. This model is evaluated based on task completion time, data size, and scalability. The results show that the different testbeds are capable communicating and splitting a single task to be completed on multiple devices. They further show that the testbeds containing multiple devices are performing better regarding completion time and do not suffer from noticeable scalability issues. Lastly, they show that the completion time drops remarkably for tasks that are split and distributed.

One of the most important attribute a cloud service provider (CSP) offers their customers through their cloud services is scalability. Scalability gives customers the ability to vary the amount of capacity when required. A cloud service can be divided in three service layers, Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS), Platform-as- a-Service (PaaS) and Software-as-a-Service (SaaS). Scalability of a certain service depends  on  software licenses on these layers. When a customer wants to increase the capacity it will be determined by the CSP's licenses bought from its suppliers in advance. If a CSP scales up more than what was agreed on, then there is a risk that the CSP needs to pay a penalty fee to the supplier. If the CSP invests in too many licenses that does not get utilized, then it will be an investment loss. A second challenge with software licensing is when a customer outsources their applications to the CSP’s platform. As each application comes with a set of licenses, there is a certain level of scalability that cannot be exceeded. If a customer wants the CSP scale up more than usual for an application then the customer need to inform the vendors. However, a common misunderstanding is that the customer expects the CSP to notify the vendor. Then there is a risk that the vendor never gets notified and the customer is in danger of paying a penalty fee. This in turn hurts the CSP’s  relationship with the customer. The recommendation to the CSP under study is to create a successful customer relationship management (CRM) and a supplier relationship management (SRM). By creating a CRM with the customer will minimize the occurring misunderstandings and highlight the responsibilities when a customer outsources an application to the CSP. By creating a SRM with the supplier will help the CSP to maintain a flexible paying method that they have with a certain supplier. Furthermore, it will set  an example to the remaining suppliers to change their inflexible paying method. By achieving a flexible payment method with the suppliers will make it easier for the CSP to find equilibrium between scalability and licenses.

Cloud computing is a fast-growing sector among software companies. Cloud platforms provide services such as spreading out storage and computational power over several geographic locations, on-demand resource allocation and flexible payment options. Virtualization is a technology used in conjunction with cloud technology and offers the possibility to share the physical resources of a host machine by hosting several virtual machines on the same physical machine. Each virtual machine runs its operating system which makes the virtual machines hardware independent. The cloud and virtualization layers add additional layers of software to the server environments to provide the services. The additional layers cause an overlay in latency which can be problematic for latency sensitive applications. The primary goal of this thesis is to investigate how the networking components impact the latency in an OpenStack cloud compared to a traditional deployment. The networking components were benchmarked under different load scenarios, and the results indicate that the additional latency added by the networking components is not too significant in the used network setup. Instead, a significant performance degradation could be seen on the applications running in the virtual machine which caused most of the added latency in the cloud environment. / Molntjänster är en snabbt växande sektor bland mjukvaruföretag. Molnplattformar tillhandahåller tjänster så som utspridning av lagring och beräkningskraft över olika geografiska områden, resursallokering på begäran och flexibla betalningsmetoder. Virtualisering är en teknik som används tillsammans med molnteknologi och erbjuder möjligheten att dela de fysiska resurserna hos en värddator mellan olika virtuella maskiner som kör på samma fysiska dator. Varje virtuell maskin kör sitt egna operativsystem vilket gör att de virtuella maskinerna blir hårdvaruoberoende. Moln och virtualiseringslagret lägger till ytterligare mjukvarulager till servermiljöer för att göra teknikerna möjliga. De extra mjukvarulagrerna orsakar ett pålägg på responstiden vilket kan vara ett problem för applikationer som kräver snabb responstid. Det primära målet i detta examensarbete är att undersöka hur de extra nätverkskomponenterna i molnplattformen OpenStack påverkar responstiden. Nätverkskomonenterna var utvärderade under olika belastningsscenarion och resultaten indikerar att den extra responstiden som orsakades av de extra nätverkskomponenterna inte har allt för stor betydelse på responstiden i den använda nätverksinstallationen. En signifikant perstandaförsämring sågs på applikationerna som körde på den virtuella maskinen vilket stod för den större delen av den ökade responstiden.

The information and communication technology industry is constantly affected by rapid changes and new development in technology. During the recent years there is an emerging trend within IT outsourcing where scalable and flexible IT enabled capabilities are delivered as a service over the Internet, called cloud computing. Software as a Service (SaaS) is one of the most adopted cloud service models, which is a software distribution model where applications are hosted by a SaaS provider and made available to the customer over a network. Tieto is present in this fast changing industry and has recognized a need to move into the cloud in order to stay competitive and meet their customers’ requests. Tieto’s department Energy Utilities wants to transform their broad portfolio of different software solutions to a SaaS delivery model. This transition will affect Tieto’s sales strategies, both in terms of pricing and marketing, and they will face challenges when changing to a SaaS delivery model. Hence, this master thesis aimed to determine important aspects when a company is changing software to a SaaS delivery model, where focus was on pricing and marketing strategies for SaaS. The objective was accomplished by conducting a case study that involved a qualitative data  ollecting method. Interviews were conducted from three different perspectives: from external SaaS providers, internally at Tieto as well as from a customer point of view. Conclusions from this thesis, was that important aspects when marketing SaaS involved:  managing the customers’ preconceptions, handling the impact of irrational factors,  nderstanding customer need and have the capability to guide and advise customers when purchasing a SaaS solution. The empirical findings showed that a value-based pricing approach was the most common strategy, using a user-based charging method and a model with different levels of subscriptions. The customers expressed that the price level was not the determining factor; instead the difference between the price level and the potential revenue generated from the SaaS solution was of importance. Furthermore, transparency and clearness are desirable conditions in a SaaS pricing model. Several challenges have been identified when transforming software to a SaaS delivery model, where multi-tenancy, security, pricing and standardization were the most common ones.

The size and complexity of cloud computing systems makes runtime errors inevitable. These errors could be caused by the system having insufficient resources or an unexpected failure in the system. In order to be able to provide highly available cloud computing services it is necessary to auto- mate the resource provisioning and failure diagnosing processes as much as possible. Log files are often a good source of information about the current status of the system. In this thesis methods for diagnosing failures and predicting system workload using log file analysis are presented and the performance of different machine learning algorithms using our proposed methods are compared. Our experimental results show that classification tree and random forest algorithms are both suitable for diagnosing failures and that Support Vector Regression outperforms linear regression and regression trees when predicting disk availability and memory usage. However, we conclude that predicting CPU utilization requires further studies.