Cloudscape: language support to coordinate and control distributed applications in the cloud

Abstract

Cloud Computing is an innovative computing proposal, which key feature is the ease and effectiveness of providing a service. There are a number of challenges that a management system for the Cloud will need to address including: scale, reliability (fault-handling and high availability), security and service heterogeneity, to achieve effectiveness. This paper proposes an agent-oriented language, called CLOUDSCAPE, to address coordination and control of components in a distributed computation to provide reliability and scalability of service in the context of the Cloud. Agents are modeled as objects extended with transitions and dependencies to describe the lifecycle state machines of components and constraints between lifecycle states. The problem context is further extended with component failure and dynamic addition of new components. The practical utility and effectiveness of this system is illustrated through a series of real-world examples. We then define a formal model of the language and prove that the operational semantics of the language holds a linear consistent shared memory property.