Textbook Co-authored By Campbell Takes An In-Depth Look At Cloud Computing

The rise of cloud computing has altered the landscape for anyone who regularly uses a computer, from YouTube watchers in search of video entertainment to governments sorting reams of data to forecast the weather, maintain a wide range of social programs, and predict national security threats.

A new textbook co-authored and co-edited by Sohaib and Sara Abbasi Professor Roy Campbell provides a guide to the challenges to providing assured cloud computing, and solutions to many of those problems.

“Assured Cloud Computing” was published last fall by the Wiley-IEEE Computer Society Press. Campbell co-authored it along with Charles Kamhoua, who is a researcher at the U.S. Army Research Laboratory, and Kevin Kwiat, a former principal computer engineer with the U.S. Air Force Research Laboratory who is now leading consulting firm Haloed Sun TEK, LLC.

The book, Campbell says, explores the increasing use of commercially available commodity hardware to build massive computing facilities. They’re used for a variety of services, some are commercial and others – such as those provided by Amazon and others to the Department of Defense – are for more-exacting government purposes.

“Usually they have some sort of mission, right? They want to do some particular task by some particular date for some particular amount of money, and they obviously don’t want it to be misdirected by enemies or whatever. So they would like it secure,” Campbell said. “The book talks about the technologies that are coming about to do that transition, and where there are missing factors.”

“Assured Cloud Computing” begins with a brief history of what is really a very short history of cloud computing – as ubiquitous as it has become, the subject is only about a decade old.

Campbell writes in the introduction: “Rapid technological advancements in global networking, commercial off-the-shelf technology, security, agility, scalability, reliability, and mobility created a window of opportunity in 2009 for reducing the costs of computation and led to the development of what is now known as cloud computing.”

“Assured Cloud Computing” collects the research of the Assured Cloud Computing Center at the University of Illinois, an Air Force Research Laboratory-funded initiative which was started in 2011 and directed by Campbell. He also was the principal investigator.

Students will find detailed discussions of, among other things, security, reliability, networking, design correctness, support for big data and analytics, monitoring and detection, and performance.

The book, Campbell said, covers an area of high interest among students.

“They inevitably end up doing cloud computing,” Campbell said. “You don’t really do very much computing on your laptop these days. You end up doing it on something else, Amazon or whatever. Everything’s coming off the cloud in some sense – your video, blogs, chat, news, adverts and social networks.”

“Assured Cloud Computing” also includes contributions from a number of others at Illinois Computer Science and elsewhere at the university: Professor Gul Agha, Assistant Professor Masooda Bashir, Professor Ravishankar Iyer, Professor Indranil Gupta, Professor Zbignew Kalbarczyk, Professor Jose Meseguer, and Professor David Nichol; also CS post-doctoral researchers Minas Charalambides and Kirill Mechitov; and PhD students Mainak Ghosh, Shadi Noghabi, Atul Sandur, Stephen Skeirik, and Le Xu.

Former visiting scholar Peter Olveczky (CS, 2010-18) and Illinois graduates Christina Abad (PhD’14), Carlo Di Giulio (MS European Union Studies, ’17), Zachary Estrada (PhD ’16), and Cuong Pham (MS ECE ’13, PhD ‘16) also contributed.