An Extensible Cloud Platform Inspired by Operating Systems

Virtualization has changed the ways computation is done, especially in utility and cloud computing. While several virtualization cloud platforms have emerged to provide interfaces between users and data centers, traditional operating systems (OSes) have defined interfaces between applications and hardware. We argue that virtualization cloud platforms and OSes can share many problems, thus, many techniques developed for OSes can be applied to such platforms. We have implemented a prototype of an OS-like middleware that adopted a micro kernel design, had resource abstraction achieved by objects and functions, and offered a scripting environment as a programming interface. The experimental results demonstrated that it had the ability to achieve elasticity and high-availability VMs. We also carried out qualitative comparisons with other middleware to clarify our research position.