UCMS: User-side Cloud Management System

IaaS cloud providers, as Amazon or Rackspace, provide their users with the abilities to create an own virtual environment, populate it with their applications, and manage a wide range of critical issues (e.g. scale up/down, load balancing, faults) by means of ad hoc services. One of the limits of these cloud systems is the lack of tools that enable the user to have a direct knowledge of the physical resources supporting his application. Some providers supply a set of tools for the monitoring of the user application (e.g. CloudWatch) but these present several limits: the monitoring time is constrained by the provider, the mechanism to get the values of the state is not always clear, the observation procedure introduces an overhead unquantifiable and, in some cases, not always negligible. To overcome such a limitation, this paper introduces UCMS, an autonomic user-side management system to monitor and control the behaviour of users applications on a Cloud environment. The main advantages offered by UCMS is its ability to modify at run-time the Components-Virtual Machines-Physical Machines mapping, previously established by both the user (components-virtual machines) and cloud provider (virtual machines-physical machines) in order to improve the exploitation of the assigned resources. Experiments led on real scenario (Amazon EC2) demonstrate the ability of UCMS to reduce the execution time of considered cloud applications (Pipeline and MapReduce) by about 50%.