A decentralized cloud management architecture based on application autonomous systems

Driven by the successful business model, cloud computing is evolving rapidly from a moderate size data center consisting of homogeneous resources to a hyper-scale heterogeneous computing environment. The evolution has made the computing environment ever-increasingly complex, thus, raises challenges for the traditional approaches for managing a cloud environment in an efficient and effective manner. In response, a decentralized system architecture for cloud management is introduced. In this architecture, the management responsibility and resource organization in a conventional cloud environment are re-considered. The re-consideration results in composing a cloud environment into three entities including the Infrastructure, the Cloud Utility and Information Base, and Application Autonomous Systems. In this configuration, service providers focus on providing connected physical resources and introducing featured resources. Information related to the Infrastructure is stored and periodically updated in the Information Base. A consumer employs an Application Autonomous System for managing the life-cycle of a cloud application. An Application Autonomous System in the context of this paper is defined as a self-contained entity that encapsulates a cloud application, the associated resources and the management functions. An Application Autonomous System uses the Information Base and Cloud Utilities to locate and acquire desired resources, subsequently resources are deployed on the Infrastructure by invoking Cloud Utilities. Thereafter, the Application Autonomous System manages the life-cycle of both the application and the associated resources. Consumers are offered opportunities to employ preferred algorithms and strategies for this management. Thus, the responsibility of cloud application management and partially the resource management has shifted from service providers to the consumers in this decentralized system architecture.