Managed control of composite cloud systems

Cloud providers have just begun to provide primitive functionality enabling users to configure and easily provision resources, primarily in the infrastructure as a service domain. In order to effectively manage cloud resources in an automated fashion, systems must automate quality-of-service (QoS) metric measurement as a part of a larger usage management strategy. Collected metrics can then be used within control loops to manage and provision cloud resources. This basic approach can be scaled to monitor the use of system artifacts as well as simple QoS parameters, and can also address the needs of large systems spanning the boundaries of single service providers though the problem seems to moving toward intractability.