Autonomic Cross-Layer Management of Cloud Systems

The current management techniques of large scale cloud systems are inefficient, and lead to high operational costs. In this paper, we present a cross-layer management framework that overcomes the current IT management challenges of cloud systems and their applications. The proposed framework monitors and performs holistic analysis of the cloud system resource utilization from the physical layer, the hypervisor layer, and the virtual machine (VM) layer. For a given set of constraints (such as low power, cost minimization, etc.), policies are generated based on the Service Level Agreements (SLAs) that will be maintained at runtime by our cross-layer management system. We have evaluated our framework using a bidding application on a private cloud system. By autonomously scaling up/down the VM resources at runtime, the cross-layer management framework can effectively improve resource utilization and reduce the operational costs.