A new approach to the design of flexible cloud management platforms

Current cloud management platforms have been designed to deal mainly with computing and storage resources. Networking, on the other hand, is often focused only on ensuring basic connectivity between virtual machines. That means, advanced requirements, such as delay and bandwidth guarantees or handing of network control to the customer, are not supported in today's platforms. Another important shortcoming is that resource management strategies are mostly implemented as part of the core of platforms, leaving little or no room for personalization by the operator or the customer. Therefore, in this paper we present the building blocks of a new conceptual architecture of a cloud platform aiming to add advanced yet robust network configuration support and more flexibility at the core of the platform to better fit the needs of each cloud environment.