A survey of management interfaces for eucalyptus cloud

Abstract

Cloud Computing is a technology which is susceptible to a continuous development, because of its strong advantages of accessing data from any place in the world over the Internet without concerning about the infrastructure used and the problems involved by the installation and maintenance processes. The purpose of this article is to provide an overview of several management interfaces for Eucalyptus cloud by addressing the taxonomy and evaluation of the cloud management interfaces. The taxonomy proposed in this paper results from the work accomplished by experimenting the Eucalyptus community cloud. First, an evaluation of the Eucalyptus architecture is presented, in order to emphasize the Eucalyptus platform involved in cloud management process, which facilitates the deployment, management and execution of Infrastructure-as-a-Service (laaS). The cloud management tools are described from two perspectives. The first perspective analyzes the cloud portals from the user roles, while the second perspective addresses them with respect to the type of the tools employed. The taxonomy presented in this paper is related with the 5 elements of the Common Cloud Management Architecture (CCMA), which was provided by Behrendt, et al. (2011) as one of the components of mM Cloud Computing Reference Architecture. Thus, the first category of interfaces (i.e. the cloud portals from the user roles) encompasses the Service Consumer Portal, the Service Provider Portal and the Service Development Portal, while second category of interfaces includes the main components of CCMA: Operational Support Services (OSS) and Business Support Services (BSS). Cloud management is a subject approached by researchers in the community and this can be observed by the big number of third party cloud management providers (i.e. RightScale, enStratus, IMOD Kaavo, CloudWatch, Scarl, Tapin, Cloudkick). This article is motivated by the fact that cloud management is a fundamental support for all users of cloud services from the cloud marketplace.