From infrastructure delivery to service management in clouds

Clouds have changed the way we think about IT infrastructure management. Providers of software-based services are now able to outsource the operation of the hardware platforms required by those services. However, as the utilization of cloud platforms grows, users are realizing that the implicit promise of clouds (leveraging them from the tasks related with infrastructure management) is not fulfilled. A reason for this is that current clouds offer interfaces too close to that infrastructure, while users demand functionalities that automate the management of their services as a whole unit. To overcome this limitation, we propose a new abstraction layer closer to the lifecycle of services that allows for their automatic deployment and escalation depending on the service status (not only on the infrastructure). This abstraction layer can sit on top of different cloud providers, hence mitigating the potential lock-in problem and allowing the transparent federation of clouds for the execution of services. Here, we present Claudia, a service management system that implements such an abstraction layer, and the results of the deployment of a grid service (based on the Sun Grid Engine software) on such system. (c) 2010 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.