Cloud Computing: Principles and Paradigms

Chapter 6. ON THE MANAGEMENT OF VIRTUAL MACHINES FOR CLOUD INFRASTRUCTURES

IGNACIO M. LLORENTE, RUBÉN S. MONTERO, BORJA SOTOMAYOR, DAVID BREITGAND, ALESSANDRO MARASCHINI, ELIEZER LEVY, and BENNY ROCHWERGER

In 2006, Amazon started offering virtual machines (VMs) to anyone with a credit card for just $0.10/hour through its Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) service. Although not the first company to lease VMs, the programmer-friendly EC2 Web services API and their pay-as-you-go pricing popularized the "Infrastructure as a Service" (IaaS) paradigm, which is now closely related to the notion of a "cloud." Following the success of Amazon EC2 [1], several other IaaS cloud providers, or public clouds, have emerged-such as Elastic—Hosts [2], GoGrid [3], and FlexiScale [4]—that provide a publicly accessible interface for purchasing and managing computing infrastructure that is instantiated as VMs running on the provider's data center. There is also a growing ecosystem of technologies and tools to build private clouds—where in-house resources are virtualized, and internal users can request and manage these resources using interfaces similar or equal to those of public clouds—and hybrid clouds—where an organization's private cloud can supplement its capacity using a public cloud.

Thus, within the broader context of cloud computing, this chapter focuses on the subject of IaaS clouds and, more specifically, on the efficient management of virtual machines in this type of cloud. Section 6.1 starts by discussing ...