Evolutionary solutions for resources management in multiple clouds: State-of-the-art and future directions

Abstract

Even though multiple clouds tackle the problem of vendor lock-in, portability and interoperability are still a challenge from the perspective of both user and provider. Resources management, which is an NP-Hard problem according to the literature, must be addressed to obtain both portability and interoperability. Several optimization techniques have been used to deal with this issue and, among them, evolutionary computation has received considerable attention due to its flexibility and efficiency. In such, to the best of our knowledge, our paper is the first in the literature to investigate the multiple clouds resources management from the user perspective, which presents and discusses works that propose solutions using evolutionary computation. To analyze those works, it is mandatory to know all demands of the users and applications; consequently, it is necessary to identify what a resource is and how it can be managed in multiple clouds. We also present demands of the users for an application management in the multiple clouds approach. Therefore, we propose a definition and a classification of resources in multiple clouds and three taxonomies related to the multiple clouds resources management. Finally, we point out some trends and future directions.