A naming system applied to a RESERVOIR cloud

Cloud environments offer a variety of concrete and abstracted entities which need to be identified. An example of cloud environment is the European project RESERVOIR, which similarly to other platforms characterized by a high level of dynamism, needs to identify and resolve resources. RESERVOIR has to manage allocation, deallocation and migration of virtual machines from an execution context to another. Such tasks could trigger identity and name alterations; in addition, a virtual machine may hold one or more names, identifiers, and representations in various execution environments. Nowadays, the Internet is using the Domain Name System (DNS), that is not suitable to such emerging scenarios. This paper aims to explore several RESERVOIR use cases, demonstrating how a flexible cloud naming system allows organizations to simplify the management of their assets deployed into the cloud.