Quality of Consumption: The Friendlier Side of Quality of Service

TL;DR

This paper introduces the concept of Quality of Consumption (QoC) alongside traditional QoS metrics, forming a combined QoX framework to enhance cloud service security and management by incorporating consumer-centric metrics and trusted information sharing.

Contribution

It proposes a novel QoX framework that integrates QoC with QoS, leveraging cloud providers as vouching authorities to improve trustworthiness and service management.

Findings

Prototype of QoX abstractions and interfaces developed

Demonstrated improved security and management through QoX

Showed potential for trusted information sharing among users

Abstract

Cloud services today are increasingly built using functionality from other running services. In this paper, we question whether legacy Quality of Services (QoS) metrics and enforcement techniques are sufficient as they are producer centric. We argue that, similar to customer rating systems found in banking systems and many sharing economy apps (e.g., Uber and Airbnb), Quality of Consumption (QoC) should be introduced to capture different metrics about service consumers. We show how the combination of QoS and QoC, dubbed QoX, can be used by consumers and providers to improve the security and management of their infrastructure. In addition, we demonstrate how sharing information among other consumers and providers increase the value of QoX. To address the main challenge with sharing information, namely sybil attacks and mis-information, we describe how we can leverage cloud providers as vouching authorities to ensure the integrity of information. We present initial results in prototyping the appropriate abstractions and interfaces in a cloud environment, focusing on the design impact on both service providers and consumers.