A Runtime Architecture Based Framework Managing Hybrid Clouds

Abstract

Cloud management becomes increasingly complex and brings high costs, especially with the advent of hybrid cloud. In a hybrid cloud, numerous resources like Virtual Machines (VMs) and Physical Machines in different clouds have to be managed together to make the whole hybrid cloud work cost-effectively. For controlling the management cost, in particular the manual management cost, many programs have been developed to take over manual management tasks or reduce their complexity and difficulty. These programs are usually hard-coded by languages like Java and C++, which bring enough capability and flexibility but also cause high programming effort and cost. As the architecture-based runtime model is causally connected with the corresponding running system automatically, constructing a hybrid cloud management system based on the architecture-based runtime models of clouds can benefit from the model-specific natures, and thus reduce the development workload. This paper proposes a runtime architecture based approach to developing the management programs in a simple but powerful enough manner. First of all, the manageability (such as APIs, configuration files and scripts) of different kinds of clouds, is abstracted as a runtime architecture based model of cloud software architecture, which can automatically and immediately propagate any observable runtime changes of the target platforms to the corresponding architecture models, and vice versa. Second, we provide a unified model of cloud software architecture, according to the domain knowledge of current cloud platforms, such as Cloud Stack, Open Stack and Eucalyptus. Third, the synchronization between the unified model and cloud runtime models is ensured through model transformation, thus, all the management tasks of the hybrid cloud, could be carried out through executing programs on the unified model, which decreases the complexity of use and management. The experiment on a real-world hybrid cloud demonstrates the feasibility, effectiveness and benefits of the new approach to managing hybrid clouds.