Chapter 8 - Managing the Cloud

Abstract

The cloud architecture consists of technologies at IaaS, PaaS, and SaaS layers. Therefore, a key requirement for the cloud architecture is efficient management of resources at all three layers of the stack. Specifically, the questions to be addressed include how to monitor performance and health of resources, how to perform fault diagnostics and recovery, and how to enforce SLAs during operation of the resources. While these are issues faced in any IT management system, these problems become harder for cloud management. The larger scale of the systems being managed, support for multitenancy, need for better precision of monitoring to support the pay-per-use model, and elasticity in the resources make the problem much harder. Automation is needed to replace manual operations and reduce overall costs. The overall objective is to maintain SLAs specified by the user, which have to be translated and ensured across the IaaS, PaaS, and SaaS layers. This chapter discusses the approaches used for IaaS monitoring and management using two IaaS solution case studies, Infrastructure as a Service. These are Cloud System Matrix an Amazon EC2 (using Amazon Cloud Watch). To study the approaches used for managing PaaS systems, the example of Microsoft Azure is revisited and the management tools used for the same are detailed. Finally, tools to manage SaaS systems are studied using NetCharts and Nimsoft as case studies.