Cloud Resource Orchestration: A Data-Centric Approach

Cloud computing provides users near instant access to seemingly unlimited resources, and provides service providers the opportunity to deploy complex information technology infrastructure, as a service, to their customers. Providers bene t from economies of scale and multiplexing gains a orded by sharing of resources through virtualization of the underlying physical infrastructure. However, the scale and highly dynamic nature of cloud platforms impose signi cant new challenges to cloud service providers. In particular, realizing sophisticated cloud services requires a cloud control framework that can orchestrate cloud resource provisioning, con guration, utilization and decommissioning across a distributed set of physical resources. In this paper we advocate a data-centric approach to cloud orchestration. Following this approach, cloud resources are modeled as structured data that can be queried by a declarative language, and updated with well-de ned transactional semantics. We examine the feasibility, bene ts and challenges of the approach, and present our design and prototype implementation of the Data-centric Management Framework (DMF) as a solution, with data models, query languages and semantics that are speci cally designed for cloud resource orchestration.