Revealing the MAPE loop for the autonomic management of Cloud infrastructures

Cloud computing is the result of the convergence of several concepts, ranging from virtualization, distributed application design, Grid computing, and enterprise IT management. Efficient management of Cloud computing infrastructures faces with the contradicting goals like unlimited scalability, provision of Service Level Agreements (SLAs), extensive use of virtualization, energy efficiency and minimization of the administration overhead by humans. Thus, autonomic computing seems to be one of the promising paradigms for the implementation of the management infrastructures for Clouds. However, currently available autonomic systems do not consider the characteristics of Clouds, e.g., virtualization layer, and thus are not easily applicable to Cloud infrastructures. In this paper we discuss first steps towards revealing the current MAPE (Monitoring, Analysis, Planning, Execution) loops for the application to Cloud infrastructures. We present novel techniques for the adequate monitoring of Clouds, discuss the approach for the knowledge management and present our solutions for facilitating SLA generation and management.