Cloud computing is the next generation IT paradigm with its features of elasticity, scalability, availability, on-demand, and pay-as-you-go services. However, cloud systems face major challenges to provide and validate the required Service Level Agreement (SLA) including the security for a wide range of cloud applications and services. Current cloud configuration and management approaches are manual intensive, ad-hoc, and error-prone. However, manual processes are inherently inconsistent and they cannot support the cloud requirements for rapid provisioning of new applications or scale up/down resources on demand. To satisfy the cloud requirements and to support government and industry security requirements, it is critically important that cloud computing infrastructures and services support efficient automation so that cloud will provide the required SLA requirements, dynamic and rapid resource provisioning on demand, elastic scalability, and so on. The goal of this workshop is to solicit original and unpublished research papers that describe techniques supporting efficient cloud automation to meet application’s SLA and security requirements.
The topics of interest include, but are not limited to:
• Dynamic configuration of cloud system resources to improve performance, security, and availability.
• Automated data storage configuration and management in cloud systems.
• Techniques to aggregate cloud infrastructures into well-defined components or structures that support automatic configuration and runtime management.
• Intelligent cloud workload characterization and prediction to achieve fault tolerance, reliability, and greater resilient operations.
• Tools to automatically configure, monitor, and validate security of cloud systems and their applications.
• Tools and techniques to pre-certify virtual machine (VM) templates, cloud template configurations and applications.
• Tools to provide cloud users full visibility into security and operations of cloud systems and applications.