Keystrokes :.

… and by the way, here is my master thesis,
presented on May, 26^th 2011.

Cloud computing represented one of the most significant shifts in the IT industry, eventually delivering the long awaited dream of computing as utility. The paradigm is rapidly evolving towards combined management of heterogeneous elements in flexible virtual infrastructures offered as a service, which fall under the name of Service Oriented Infrastructures (SOIs). This work focuses on how software applications’ design can exploit the advantages of such dynamic infrastructure services, in order to satisfy non-functional requirements. First, a detailed instance of new generation SOI is presented, outlining the GEYSERS project. GEYSERS Service Delivery Framework (SDF) will enable flexible, combined “optical networks + any IT” Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) provisioning, guaranteed by Service Level Agreements (SLAs) and designed with energy efficiency in mind. Considering this kind of services, this work aims to identify the set of most relevant problems for three major non-functional requirements, and to collect and present proper solution strategies. Wide Area Network (WAN) optimization is considered in the first place, decoupling the argument in this work from optical technologies employed by the GEYSERS project, and making it suitable for generic SOIs. Problems relevant to security are then investigated: first the additional concerns introduced by the new paradigm are identified; then, they are discussed from the different viewpoints of network security, data security and security auditing. Scalability is finally addressed, presenting popular techniques used by enterprise software systems and web-scale applications. This work concludes discussing the concept of service templates, and presenting few examples, in which the usage of illustrated techniques is exemplified.