The KOALA Cloud Manager: Cloud Service Management the Easy Way

The key advantages of cloud computing are flexibility, scalability (elasticity) and usability and these features originate in the combination of virtualization technologies with web services. However, in contrast to the elasticity and flexibility of cloud services the traditional management methods and tools seem inappropriate because they usually require local software installation with continuous updates and patches. Furthermore, the solutions are often proprietary and only conform to the cloud service offerings of specific service providers, making it difficult to work with cloud services of different providers. A vendor agnostic generic cloud based software service would bear many advantages in this area. This paper describes the design of a better management solution - the KOALA cloud management service - for cloud services and its implementation.