Self-Managing Data in the Clouds

Abstract

The cloud offers an attractive platform for storage and access to data. However, data is usually expected to only exist within the context of a single cloud platform. We investigate a concept where management meta-code is coupled with data items. Meta-code describes core functionality which should always be considered when storing or accessing data. The goal is to simplify management tasks by composing the desired set of meta-code modules for collections of data items, and executing them when appropriate. We evaluate the run-time environment, Suorgi, which is designed to achieve this. Our results show that Suorgi and meta-code is a practical approach to supporting data management tasks, and it makes this fine-level management easy to express for the data owner.