Multi-cloud-aware middleware

Abstract

The idea of collaboration among clouds has emerged to address issues related to single cloud adoption. From the developer’s perspective, distributed applications can take advantage of multi-cloud environments to create, extend and integrate their components across cloud domains in a dynamic, automatic and transparent way and improve their quality requirements, such as availability, performance, and scalability. However, the management complexity increases sub- stantially in this scenario, whose responsibility lies with the developer. Despite standardisation efforts, most applications cannot exploit multi-cloud benefits (e.g., elasticity). Furthermore, solutions for interoperability, cloud’s administrative boundaries, and the lock-in problem remain as open challenges, concerning at the IaaS level, unaware of what is running on top of it. This work proposes a middleware architecture for distributed applications in multi-cloud environ- ments: Multi-Cloud Aware Middleware (M-CaMid). The architecture combines middleware functionalities with IaaS services for distributed application management. M-CaMid takes ad- vantage of elasticity to provide a cross management that integrates infrastructure and application layers (vertical management) and integrate many clouds (horizontal management), enabling a holistic view of distributed systems and a better application performance and rational usage of cloud resources. Experiments were carried out to assess the performance gains due to M-CaMid. Results show that cross management can improve performance of distributed applications and ra- tional usage of cloud resources for distributed applications in a multi-cloud environment. Thesis’ unique contributions are: (i) middleware architecture for distributed application management in a multi-cloud environment; (ii) cross management that integrates infrastructure and application layers and many clouds; and (iii) multi-cloud elasticity that extends single cloud elasticity to the multi-cloud scope.