Multicloud Resource Allocation

Nowadays our daily life is not only powered by water, electricity, gas and telephony but by "cloud" as well. Big cloud vendors such as Amazon, Microsoft and Google have built large-scale centralized data centers to achieve economies of scale, on-demand resource provisioning, high resource availability and elasticity. However, those massive data centers also bring about many other problems, e.g., bandwidth bottlenecks, privacy, security, huge energy consumption, legal and physical vulnerabilities. One of the possible solutions for those problems is to employ multicloud architectures. In this thesis, our work provides research contributions to multicloud resource allocation from three perspectives of cooperation, optimization and data sharing. We address the following problems in the multicloud: how resource providers cooperate in a multicloud, how to reduce information leakage in a multicloud storage system and how to share the big data in a cost-effective way. More specifically, we make the following contributions: Cooperation in the decentralized cloud. We propose a decentralized cloud model in which a group of SDCs can cooperate with each other to improve performance. Moreover, we design a general strategy function for SDCs to evaluate the performance of cooperation based on different dimensions of resource sharing. Through extensive simulations using a realistic data center model, we show that the strategies based on reciprocity are more effective than other strategies, e.g., those using prediction based on historical data. Our results show that the reciprocity-based strategy can thrive in a heterogeneous environment with competing strategies. Multicloud optimization on information leakage. In this work, we firstly study an important information leakage problem caused by unplanned data distribution in multicloud storage services. Then, we present StoreSim, an information leakage aware storage system in multicloud. StoreSim aims to store syntactically similar data on the same cloud, thereby minimizing the user's information leakage across multiple clouds. We design an approximate algorithm to efficiently generate similarity-preserving signatures for data chunks based on MinHash and Bloom filter, and also design a function to compute the information leakage based on these signatures. Next, we present an effective storage plan generation algorithm based on clustering for distributing data chunks with minimal information leakage across multiple clouds. Finally, we evaluate our scheme using two real datasets from Wikipedia and GitHub. We show that our scheme can reduce the information leakage by up to 60% compared to unplanned placement. Furthermore, our analysis in terms of system attackability demonstrates that our scheme makes attacks on information much more complex. Smart data sharing. Moving large amounts of distributed data into the cloud or from one cloud to another can incur high costs in both time and bandwidth. The optimization on data sharing in the multicloud can be conducted from two different angles: inter-cloud scheduling and intra-cloud optimization. We first present CoShare, a P2P inspired decentralized cost effective sharing system for data replication to optimize network transfer among small data centers. Then we propose a data summarization method to reduce the total size of dataset, thereby reducing network transfer.