Cloud Management and Security

3 Fundamentals of Cloud Management

This chapter presents fundamental concepts about Cloud management platforms. Understanding the Cloud management process helps in realizing Cloud attributes, which are key for the development and enhancement of Cloud computing. The chapter starts by identifying and discussing the main services for managing Cloud resources. It then presents a unified view of the most well-known Cloud management platforms. Subsequently, the chapter discusses the required input data that such platforms would need to consider in order to make the right decisions. Following that, the chapter presents an end-to-end workflow for managing user requirements in the Cloud. We then identify the weaknesses in the workflow. Finally, we identify and discuss the challenges of managing the Cloud infrastructure, and present the requirements which could address the challenges.

3.1 Introduction

Based on the NIST definition of Cloud computing (see Chapter 1), one of the key features of Cloud is the provision of minimal management effort or service provider intervention. This is a key attribute of Clouds, and without it the Cloud cannot practically satisfy many of its potential features for different reasons, as we discuss throughout this chapter. Meeting this attribute is a major challenge in the Cloud environment, and would require enormous collaborative efforts between academia and industry. The provision of such a feature is not only important to reduce management costs and ...