A model-based proxy for unified IaaS management

The use of Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) has become more and more prevalent over the past few years. Many IaaS users face the challenge of managing different services and applications running on different IaaS providers. This requires them to interact with different APIs offered by the different providers, and increases the complexity of managing their services. In this paper, we address this problem by modeling IaaS using the DMTF Common Information Model (CIM) meta-model. Based on this model, a generic IaaS proxy was developed using Web2Exchange to enable users to easily manage services provided by variant IaaS providers in a heterogeneous environment. As an initial case study we have prototyped the unified IaaS proxy with capability to support management of Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) service.