Cloud resource orchestration: A data-centric approach

Cloud computing provides users near instant access to seem-ingly unlimited resources, and provides service providers the opportunity to deploy complex information technology in-frastructure, as a service, to their customers. Providers ben-efit from economies of scale and multiplexing gains afforded by sharing of resources through virtualization of the under-lying physical infrastructure. However, the scale and highly dynamic nature of cloud platforms impose significant new challenges to cloud service providers. In particular, real-izing sophisticated cloud services requires a cloud control framework that can orchestrate cloud resource provisioning, configuration, utilization and decommissioning across a dis-tributed set of physical resources. In this paper we advocate a data-centric approach to cloud orchestration. Following this approach, cloud resources are modeled as structured data that can be queried by a declarative language, and up-dated with well-defined transactional semantics. We exam-ine the feasibility, benefits and challenges of the approach, and present our design and prototype implementation of the Data-centric Management Framework (DMF) as a solution, with data models, query languages and semantics that are specifically designed for cloud resource orchestration. 1