Elastic management of cluster-based services in the cloud

Abstract

In this paper we analyze the deployment of generic clustered services on top of a virtualized infrastructure layer that combines a VM manager (the OpenNebula engine) and a cloud resource provider (Amazon EC2). The use of this virtualization layer between the service and the physical infrastructure extends the classical benefits of VM platforms to distributed infrastructures. Additionally, the integration of the cloud in this layer allows us to give additional capacity to the services using an external provider, thus complementing the local infrastructure without notice from the users or affecting the service workload. This flexible approach, which separates the resource provisioning from the service management, provides important benefits: elastic service capacity to adapt it to its dynamic workload; physical infrastructure partitioning to isolate it from other running services; and support for heterogeneous configurations tailored for each service class. The feasibility of the proposed approach is analyzed for two different clustered services: a classical computing cluster and a web server.