Dohko: an autonomic system for provision, configuration, and management of inter-cloud environments based on a software product line engineering method

Configuring and executing applications across multiple clouds is a challenging task due to the various terminologies used by the cloud providers. Therefore, we advocate the use of autonomic systems to do this work automatically. Thus, in this paper, we propose and evaluate Dohko, an autonomic and goal-oriented system for inter-cloud environments. Dohko implements self-configuration, self-healing, and context-awareness properties. Likewise, it relies on a hierarchical P2P overlay (a) to manage the  virtual machines running on the clouds and (b) to deal with inter-cloud communication. Furthermore, it depends on a software product line engineering method to enable applications’ deployment and reconfiguration, without requiring pre-configured virtual machine images. Experimental results show that Dohko can free the users from the duty of executing non-native cloud application on single and over many clouds. In particular, it tackles the lack of middleware prototypes that can support different scenarios when using simultaneous services from multiple clouds.