A Cloud Resource Orchestration Framework for Simplifying the Management of Web Applications

摘要

Cloud computing paradigm [1] has shifted the computing from physical hardware-and locally managed software-enabled platforms to virtualized cloud-hosted services. Cloud computing assembles large networks of virtualized services: hardware resources (CPU, storage, and network) and software resources (e.g., databases, load-balancers, monitoring systems, etc.). Key issue in exploiting the potential of cloud computing is "Resource Orchestration". Resource orchestration process spans across a range of operations from selection, assembly, and deployment of resources to monitoring their run-time performance statistics (e.g. load, availability, throughput, utilization, etc.). The process aims to ensure achievement of fault-tolerant and QoS fulfillment states by resources and applications through adaptive management. Existing cloud resource orchestration techniques require human familiarity with different types of resources and typically rely on procedural programming in general-purpose or scripting languages. The interaction with resources is mainly performed through low-level APIs and command line interfaces. Given the proliferation of new providers offering resources at different layers (e.g. software-as-a-service, platform-as-a-service, and infrastructure-as-a-service), such orchestration techniques are therefore inadequate to make the cloud resources accessible to a wide variety of users, particularly from non-IT domain.