Monitoring and management of a cloud application within a federation of cloud providers

Abstract

Cloud federation is an emerging computing model where multiple resources from independent cloud providers are leveraged to create large-scale distributed virtual computing clusters, operating as within a single cloud organisation. This concept of service aggregation is characterised by interoperability features, which can address different problems about inter-cloud collaboration. One of the main issues within a cloud federation is related to the monitoring of the application deployed on resources coming from different vendors belonging to the federation. We present an agent-based architecture that aims at monitoring the user's cloud environment provided by the federation: the elasticity of the proposed architecture allows the configuration and customisation of the monitoring infrastructure to adapt it to the specific cloud application. Agents will be strengthened by algorithms and rules used to monitor QoS parameters that are critical for the specific application. The prototypal implementation of the proposed framework will be applied on a testbed application to validate the monitoring architecture.