Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
Agent Based Application Tools
for Cloud Provisioning and Management
Luca Tasquier, Salvatore Venticinque, Rocco Aversa,
and Beniamino Di Martino
Department of Information Engineering, Second University of Naples, Aversa, Italy
luca.tasquier@gmail.com
,
{
salvatore.venticinque,rocco.aversa
}
@unina2.it
,
beniamino.dimartino@unina.it
Abstract.
When service providers move to IAAS Clouds, whether their
service is delivered by a legacy application, either it has been developed by
a deployable open platform, the provisioning and the management work-
flow of the computing infrastructure really changes. Here we describe a
set of tools which can be used to orchestrate agents' based services, which
provide facilities for provisioning, management and monitoring of Clouds.
The user is able to discover, allocate, configure and monitor Cloud services
at infrastructure level through an approach that is agnostic respect to the
specific Cloud vendor or to the Cloud technology.
1
Introduction
When service providers move to IAAS Clouds, whether their service is deliv-
ered by a legacy application, either it has been developed by a deployable open
platform, the provisioning and the management workflow of the computing in-
frastructure really changes. First of all the Cloud elasticity supports the re-
configuration of the computing resources when application requirements change
dynamically and the
pay-per-use
business model allows for the possibility to
change the Resource Providers when a more convenient offer is found. Of course
a number of issues arise in the current Cloud scenario due to the lack of in-
teroperability among different technological Cloud solutions and because of the
limited portability of Cloud applications. However, even when the service de-
veloper is able to overcome these diculties, by making technical choices that
are independent respect to the Cloud provider, it is not easy to discover and
retrieve the available Cloud proposals, to check if they can accomplish the ser-
vice requirements, and also to compare each other. Currently there is not a
common ontology for describing service terms and service levels, neither in a
formal way nor through natural language. Other issues regard the management
of the acquired resources. Also in this case the lack of a wide adopted standard
for service at Cloud infrastructure level (IAAS) affects the chance of opting for
a different commercial or technological solution. In fact the use will have to
change both management tool and methodology. Finally, the last motivation
we are addressing deals with monitoring of resource utilization. This problem
