Managing Clouds in Cloud Platforms

Managing cloud services is a fundamental challenge in todays virtualized environments. These challenges equally face both providers and consumers of cloud services. The issue becomes even more challenging in virtualized environments that support mobile clouds. Cloud computing platforms such as Amazon EC2 provide customers with flexible, on demand resources at low cost. However, they fail to provide seamless infrastructure management and monitoring capabilities that many customers may need. For instance, Amazon EC2 doesn’t fully support cloud services automated discovery and it requires a private set of authentication credentials. Salesforce.com, on the other hand, do not provide monitoring access to their underlying systems. Moreover, these systems fail to provide infrastructure monitoring of heterogenous and legacy systems that don’t support agents. In this work, we explore how to build a cloud management system that combines heterogeneous management of virtual resources with comprehensive management of physical devices. We propose an initial prototype for automated cloud management and monitoring framework. Our ultimate goal is to develop a framework that have the capability of automatically tracking configuration and relationships while providing full event management, measuring performance and testing thresholds, and measuring availability consistently. Armed with such a framework, operators can make better decisions quickly and more efficiently.