Roystonea: A Cloud Computing System with Pluggable Component Architecture

A Cloud computing system provides infrastructure layer services to users by managing virtualized infrastructure resources. The infrastructure resources include CPU, hyper visor, storage, and networking. Each category of infrastructure resources is a subsystem in a cloud computing system. The cloud computing system coordinates infrastructure subsystems to provide services to users. Most current cloud computing systems lacks pluggability in their infrastructure subsystems and decision algorithms, which restricts the development of infrastructure subsystems and decision algorithms in cloud computing system. A cloud computing system should have the flexibility to switch from one infrastructure subsystem to another, and one decision algorithm to another with ease. This paper describes Roystonea, a hierarchical distributed cloud computing system with plug gable component architecture. The component pluggability ability gives administrators the flexibility to use the most appropriate subsystem as they wish. The component pluggability of Roystonea is based on a specifically designed interfaces among Roystonea controlling system and infrastructure subsystems components. The component pluggability also encourages the development of infrastructure subsystems in cloud computing. Roystonea provides a test bed for designing decision algorithms used in cloud computing system. The decision algorithms are totally isolated from other components in Roystonea architecture, so the designers of the decision algorithms can focus on algorithm design without worrying about how his algorithm will interact with other Roystonea components. We believed that component pluggability will be one of the most important issues in the research of cloud computing system.