A Unified Business-Driven Cloud Management Framework

Cloud system management is complex due to their diversity and frequent runtime changes. Cloud systems were previously managed through cloud specific management tools that focus on optimising technical metrics, such as performance. However, business users care business metrics (such as cost and revenue) more than technical metrics. To address these issues, this paper proposes a unified business-driven cloud management framework, which enables optimisation of business metrics without limiting business to a specific cloud provider. The main contributions include: (1) a taxonomy which defines a set of actions, events and metrics for unified cloud management; (2) a cloud management policy language that specifies cloud management policies from a business perspective; and (3) middleware architecture that allows business-driven management of diverse clouds. The proposed solutions are evaluated in terms of feasibility, functional correctness, generality, usefulness, and performance.