Importance of Application-Level Resource Management in Multi-Cloud Deployments

Cloud service providers started with Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) offerings and over time expanded into Platform as a Service (PaaS) and Software as a Service (SaaS). Even though each provider has a rich product offering, there are many scenarios where a multi-cloud strategy is desirable: utilizing economic dynamics, preventing data lock-in with one vendor, circumventing geographic restrictions, complying with local regulations, or combining on-premise and public-cloud resources. The challenge from a consumer perspective with multi-cloud deployments is the lack of a common abstraction for the offered products and a standardized way to express all of the application requirements for the resulting deployments. In this paper, we contribute by making yet another case for multi-cloud deployments and by predicting the emergence of a new generation of application-level resource managers which will natively support multi-cloud for enterprise applications. We identify three main components of the feedback loop controlled application-level resource managers: the software life-cycle manager, the data storage and access manager, and the service execution manager.