Towards a Model-Defined Cloud-of-Clouds

With the growth in the number of Cloud Service Providers, many enterprises and organizations are now able to use multiple cloud platforms in order to achieve improved overall Quality-of-Service (QoS), reliability and cost efficiency. However, due to the diversity in architecture and functionalities among different cloud platforms, it is difficult to build a system that simultaneously manages multiple clouds, i.e., A cloud-of-clouds. This paper presents a model-defined approach to the development of a cloud-of-clouds management (abbreviated as CCMan) system. The runtime model of a CCMan system that meets custom management requirements is constructed through model construction, model merging and model transformation. Each step of the approach is presented in detail in terms of an example. Evaluation of the approach from several perspectives shows that the efforts needed to both develop the CCMan system and operate its services are significantly reduced with negligible performance loss.