Pack your sack for the cloud

With the emergence of cloud computing, driven by significant advances in virtualization and network technologies, enterprise computing is witnessing a major paradigm shift in terms of resource consolidation. This paper introduces the concept of a comprehensive management framework for resource consolidation in cloud based systems. As it turns out, there are several interesting optimization problems with respect to resource and service utilization. This paper is a modest attempt to identify a generic pattern in the family of optimization problems and propose a unified formalism to address the associated issues. In this work we demystify a number of optimization problems in the cloud management framework and map them to the Knapsack Problem, a well-researched problem in the academic community. We believe that this classification will have significant value proposition to the cloud designer community. The repertoire of methodologies available in Knapsack research can easily provide a ready toolset to the cloud community for solving a number of key design issues.