Self-managed Microkernels: From Clouds towards Resource Fabrics

Cloud Computing provides a solution for remote hosting of applications and processes in a scalable and managed environment. With the increasing number of cores in a single processor and better network performance, provisioning on platform level becomes less of an issue for future machines and thus for future business environments. Instead, it will become a major issue to manage the vast amount of computational resources within the direct environment of each process — across the web or locally. Future resource management will have to investigate in particular into dynamic & intelligent processes (re)distribution according to resource availability and demand. This paper elaborates the specific issues faced in future “cloud environments” and proposes a microkernel architecture designed to compensate these deficits.