Information Technology Reference
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has been extensively investigated with the perspective of the resource provider,
which aims at optimizing the utilization of its physical resources in order to im-
prove its own service level and to increase its profit. However monitoring needs
to be addressed with a different perspective in the case of a service provider
that stocks computing resources through the Cloud market. Cloud customers
cannot check the compliance of the Service Level Agreement (SLA) trusting the
monitoring service of the same provider, who has a conflicting interest ensuring
the guarantees on service levels it provides. Besides Cloud customers needs to
detect under-utilization and overload conditions. In both the cases it is neces-
sary to dimension the Cloud resource to avoid useless expenses and to not fail
to satisfy the service requirements when workloads change dynamically. In this
paper we present a set of tools which allows the user for orchestrating agents
based services, which support discovery, brokering, management and monitor-
ing of Cloud resources. We describe how these services can be used to execute
a workflow for Cloud governance that allows for vendor agnostic provisioning,
deployment, management and monitoring Cloud services at Infrastructure level.
Related work is presented in Section 2. In Section 3 we introduce the available
services and a workflow for Cloud governance. Section 5 describes application
tools and how they can be used. Finally conclusions are due.
2 Related Work
The design and development of solutions for governance of multiple heteroge-
neous cloud is an issue addressed both in research activities and commercial
domains[4].Herewebrieflyprovideanoverview about related work and the
technological assessment for Cloud provisioning, management and monitoring.
The brokering of Cloud providers, whose offers can meet the requirements of a
particular application, is a complex issue due to the different business models
that are associated with such computing systems. The current Cloud computing
technologies offer a limited support for dynamic negotiation of SLAs among
participants. The work presented in [10] represents a first proposal to com-
bine SLA-based resource negotiations with virtualized resources in terms of on-
demand service provision. The architecture description focuses on three topics:
agreement negotiation, service brokering and deployment using virtualization.
It involves multi- ple brokers. A Cloud multi-agent management architecture is
proposed in [5]. A simpler agents based architecture has been proposed in [13].
Preliminary investigations by the authors on related topics have been presented
in [12]. SLA@SOI is the main project that aims (together with other relevant
goals) at offering an open source based SLA management framework. It will
provide benefits of predictability, transparency and automation in an arbitrary
service-oriented infrastructure. About management of heterogeneous Clouds, in-
teroperability is the main issue. By the research community there are many
standardization efforts. Some examples are OCCI (Open Cloud Computing Inter-
face), by the Open Grid Forum, and SOCCI (Service-Oriented Cloud-Computing
Infrastructure) by the ISO Study Group on Cloud Computing (SGCC). In par-
ticular OCCI (Open Cloud Computing Interface) is a proposal of standard for
