Domain-based virtualized resource management in cloud computing

Cloud computing has drawn much attention in recent years. One of its delivery models, called infrastructure as a service (IaaS), provides users with infrastructure services such as computation and data storage, heavily dependent upon virtualization techniques that offers benefits such as elasticity and cost efficiency. Most of current IaaS service providers have adopted a user-based service model, where users are directly mapped to virtualized resources that they want to use and they are charged based on usage. Hence, user and resource management are centralized and easily administered at the IaaS provider. However, this also results in the lack of support for scalable management of users and resources, organization-level security policy, let alone flexible pricing model. Considering the increasing popularity of cloud computing, there is a strong need for a more scalable and flexible IaaS model, along with a more fine grained access control mechanism. In this paper we propose a domain-based framework for provisioning and managing users and virtualized resources in IaaS to address this issue. Specifically, an additional layer called domain is introduced to the user-based service model, and the domain layer facilitates the de-centralization of user and virtualized resource management in IaaS. The cloud service provider is able to delegate its administrative works to domains, and domains manage their users and virtualized resources allocated from the cloud service provider. Our framework provides benefits such as scalable user/resource management, domain-based advanced policy support, and flexible pricing.