A Model-Driven Framework for Interoperable Cloud Resources Management

The proliferation of cloud computing has enabled powerful virtualization capabilities and outsourcing strategies. Suitably, a vast variety of cloud resource configuration and management tools have emerged to meet this needs, whereby DevOps are empowered to design end-to-end and automated cloud management tasks that span across a selection of best-of-breed tools. However, inherent heterogeneities among resource description models and management capabilities of such tools pose fundamental limitations when managing complex and dynamic cloud resources. In this paper we thus propose the notion of "Domain-specific Models" a higher-level model-driven approach for describing elementary and federated cloud resources as reusable knowledge artifacts over existing tools. We also propose a pluggable architecture to translate these artifacts into lower-level resource descriptions and management rules. This paper describes concepts, techniques and a prototypical implementation. Experiments on real-world federated cloud resources display significant improvements in productivity. As well as notably enhanced usability achieved by our approach in comparison to traditional techniques.