Title: CloudAqua: A Quantitative Approach to Availability in Cloud Services

Abstract:
Cloud services may be disrupted by various failures ranging from very frequent small scale failures (such as a few isolated individual server/switch failures) to less frequent, yet non-negligible, large-scale failures (such as rack or cluster failures). With our growing dependence on cloud services for both commercial and personal use, their reliability and availability have become increasingly critical. Despite existing (mostly ad hoc) approaches to improving the cloud service reliability and availability, a recent report found that on average, a service outage lasts about 134 minutes, and these service outages cost about $426 billion of loss worldwide annually.
In addition, existing SLAs are often loosely defined, and lack of reliability/availability guarantees has been cited as the top concern over cloud services among IT professionals in a 2012 global survey. In this talk, I will discuss both the challenges and opportunities related to service availability prediction, resource provisioning, and availability-aware VM placement/allocation.  and if time permits, will also present our work on cost-effective solutions to problems from the perspective of cloud service providers, ranging from SLA contract designs to creating survivable virtual infrastructures in a distributed multi-datacenter environment.

Bio:
Chunming Qiao chairs the CSE Department at SUNY Buffalo. He also directs the Lab for Advanced Network Design, Analysis, and Research (LANDER) at SUNY Buffalo with current foci on  cyber physical/transportation systems, cloud computing, network function virtualization (NFV), and smartphone systems. He has published extensively with an h-index of over 60, and is among the Top 100 Authors in Computer Science, Networks and Communications according to Microsoft Academic Ranking. He has received many awards including SUNY Chancellor's Award and several Best Paper awards from IEEE and Joint ACM/IEEE venues. He also has 7 US patents and served as a consultant for several IT and Telecommunications companies since 2000.
He pioneered work on optical Internet with optical burst switching (OBS) and heterogeneous wireless systems with  integrated cellular and ad hoc relaying systems (icAR), and a single paper of his has been cited over 2,000 times by his peers.  His research has been featured in BusinessWeek, Wireless Europe, CBC and NewScientists, and funded by a dozen major IT and telecommunications companies including Cisco and Google, and about a dozen NSF grants. He has given more than a dozen of keynotes, and numerous invited talks, chaired and co-chaired a dozen of leading international conferences and workshops including INFOCOM, IWQoS, MASS and WoWMoM, and served on the editorial board of several journals include IEEE Transactions on Networks, and Transactions on TPDS. He was elected to IEEE Fellow for his contributions to optical and wireless network architectures and protocols.