Cloud management

• Published in: Journal of internet services and applications Vol. 3; no. 1; pp. 67 - 75
• Main Authors: Cook, Nigel, Milojicic, Dejan, Talwar, Vanish
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: London Springer London 01.05.2012
• Subjects: Computer Applications; Computer Communication Networks; Computer Science; Computer Systems Organization and Communication Networks; Information Systems and Communication Service; IT in Business; Processor Architectures; SI: FOME - The Future of Middleware; Service management; Heterogeneity; Integration; Scalability; Cloud services; Middleware; Service level agreements
• ISSN: 1867-4828; 1869-0238
• DOI: 10.1007/s13174-011-0053-8

Cloud computing offers a number of benefits, such as elasticity with the perception of unlimited resources, self-service, on-demand, automation, etc. However, these benefits create new requirements for management of cloud computing. On the back-end, economic limitations dictate careful consolidation of servers with clear sustainability analysis; managed levels of abstractions are higher (from hardware, to VMs, to services); and reliability, availability, and supportability are built into higher levels of systems and services. On the client-side, cloud services have to be easy to use/manage, perform well, and be reliable. On both sides, geographical distribution and its implications on business continuity is a rule rather than exception; scalability is built-in by design; and QoS is still being defined. In this paper, we discuss new requirements and approaches to cloud management. We present a few examples of cloud management for private, public, and HPC clouds. Based on these, we derive conclusions about manageability of current platforms and then make predictions about the research challenges of future cloud management. We expect these findings to help designers of next generation hardware and software platforms to develop more manageable systems and solutions.