Towards runtime model based integrated management of cloud resources

Although there are many management systems, Cloud management still faces with great challenges, due to the diversity of Cloud resources and ever-changing management requirements. Integration and adaptation become important for constructing a cloud management system, because a redevelopment solution based on existing systems is usually more practicable than developing the management system from scratch. However, the workload of redevelopment is also very high. As the runtime model is causally connected with the corresponding running system automatically, constructing an integrated Cloud management system based on runtime models can benefit from the model-specific natures to reduce the development workload. Therefore, in this paper, we present a runtime model based approach to constructing cloud management system. First, we construct the runtime model of each Cloud resource based on its own management interfaces. Second, we construct a composite model reflecting integration management requirements through merging the distributed runtime models. Third, we make Cloud management meet the adaptation requirements through model transformation from the composite model to the customized models specific to different administrators. Such architecture-level integrated management brings many advantages related to the interoperability, reusability and simplicity. The experiment on a real-world cloud demonstrates the feasibility, effectiveness and benefits of the new approach to integrated management of Cloud resources.