Cloud Resource Orchestration Programming: Overview, Issues, and Directions

Cloud computing provides on-demand access to affordable hardware (such as multicore CPUs, GPUs, disk drives, and networking equipment) and software (databases, application servers, load-balancers, data processors, and frameworks). The pervasiveness and power of cloud computing alleviates some of the problems that application administrators face in their existing hardware and locally managed software environments. However, the rapid increase in scale, dynamicity, heterogeneity, and diversity of cloud resources necessitates having expert knowledge about programming complex orchestration operations (for example, selection, deployment, monitoring, and runtime control) on those resources to achieve the desired quality of service. This article provides an overview of the key cloud resource types and resource orchestration operations, with special focus on research issues involved in programming those operations.