Cross-layer management of distributed applications on multi-clouds

Existing cloud provisioning and deployment frameworks do not yet provide sufficient support for multi-cloud setups. In this paper we improve on the state of the art by adapting the SmartFrog framework to handle multi-cloud setups during the lifecycle (provisioning, deployment, change management, termination) of distributed applications. An administrator of a private cloud additionally needs to be aware of cross-layer dependencies between application components and the physical infrastructure to efficiently carry out a range of administration tasks. In this paper we propose an information repository and system to discover and store such cross-layer dependencies and use it to answer questions such as ”which physical machines are hosting particular application components (through hypervisors)” and vice versa. We demonstrate the use of our system in two cases of service-instance (SI) migration and replication on federated multi-cloud setups using the SPEC jEnterprise2010 application benchmark: a) migration of a SI from a private to a public cloud to support the need for maintaining service availability during downtime of physical hardware at the private cloud; b) replication of a SI from a large cloud provider to a regional (or ”near”) cloud provider to improve response time of clients that are geographically closer to the latter.