Autonomic management of elastic services in the cloud

Cloud computing, with its support for elastic resources that are available on an on-demand, pay-as-you-go basis, is an attractive platform for hosting Web-based services that have variable demand, yet consistent performance requirements. Effective service management is mandatory in order for services running in the cloud, which we call elastic services, to be cost-effective. In this paper we describe a management framework to facilitate elasticity of resource consumption by services in the cloud. We extend our framework for services management with the necessary concepts and properties to support elastic services. A prototype implementation is described.