Complex Event Processing for Mastering the Elastic Cloud
Cloud computing consists of an elastic network of distributed and heterogeneous computers offering their resources, data and software as services to the end user. In order to use a cloud infrastructure in an effective and secure way, it is indispensable to monitor and control the infrastructure and all running services continuously. This allows detecting business-critical situations like violations of service level agreements or malware early. CEP is a new cross-cutting and standardized technology providing a cost-effective alternative to the commonly used monitoring solutions. In comparison to these traditional approaches, one major advantage of CEP is its ability to derive meaningful (complex) events from elementary ones in near real-time. Complex events are not only delivered every 5 minutes, but whenever new influencing elementary events occur.
In the project CEP4Cloud of the distributed systems and database research groups at the University of Marburg, a prototype for monitoring and controlling elastic clouds has been developed in a joint venture with Software AG. A running instance of the prototype was presented at the CeBIT and the two ProcessWorlds in 2011.