∗Automated Infrastructure Laboratories

Abstract—Cloud computing entails many challenges related to the management of on-demand virtual infrastructures. One of these challenges is the automated provisioning of services in cloud infrastructures. Users can request virtual machines from cloud infrastructure providers, but these machines have to be configured and managed properly in order to be useful. This paper describes an architecture that enables the automated provisioning of services in the cloud. The architecture orches-trates the different steps involved in the provisioning of services, such as the management of virtual infrastructures (creation and deletion of VMs, networks, etc) as well as the installation, configuration, monitoring and execution of software into the VMs. This architecture is extensible and able to deal with different software components and cloud providers to carry out the provisioning of the service. To fully support the automatic cloud service provisioning, a high level tool is introduced which enables a user to select and customize a predefined service from a services catalog. As a proof of concept, a prototype has been implemented. Implementation aspects and statistics results are provided to furthervalidate the proposal. I