Topology Discovery and Service Classification for Distributed-Aware Clouds

Cloud data centers are difficult to manage because providers have no knowledge of what applications are being run by customers or how they interact. As a consequence, current clouds provide minimal automated management functionality, passing the problem on to users who have access to even fewer tools since they lack insight into the underlying infrastructure. Ideally, the cloud platform, not the customer, should be managing data center resources in order to both use them efficiently and provide strong application-level performance and reliability guarantees. To do this, we believe that clouds must become "distibuted-aware" so that they can deduce the overall structure and dependencies within a client's distributed applications and use that knowledge to better guide management services. Towards this end we are developing a light-weight topology detection system that maps distributed applications and a service classification algorithm that can determine not only overall application types, but individual VM roles as well.