An application-centric model for cloud management

The cloud model is increasingly popular as a means of creating dynamic, flexible and cost effective network-centric application infrastructures. The model separates the applications, or application cloud, from the resources, or resource cloud, upon which the applications will be hosted. There are an increasing number of utility resource providers that aim to provide cloud infrastructure on demand to users and libraries that aim to manage owned infrastructure as a resource cloud. There is, unfortunately, no common API for cloud resources and it is unlikely that one will emerge soon given the immaturity of the area and the competing commercial interests in the domain. In this paper, we outline our commodity and application-centric approach to resource management, and describe our integration framework for cloud application management-illustrating its use in a field deployed application and a particular dynamic component within that application.