Infrastructure outsourcing in multi-cloud environment

Abstract

Infrastructure clouds created ideal conditions for users to outsource their infrastructure needs by offering on-demand, shortterm access, pay-as-you-go business model, the use of virtualization technologies which provide a safe and cost-effective way for users to manage and customize their environments, and sheer convenience, as users and institutions no longer have to have specialized IT departments and can focus on their core mission instead. These key innovations however also bring challenges which include high levels of failure; lack of interoperability between cloud providers, which puts significant lock-in pressure on the user, and lack of tools that allow users to leverage the on-demand growing and shrinking of infrastructure. All these factors prevent users from capitalizing on the infrastructure cloud opportunity. In this paper we propose a multicloud auto-scaling service that enables the user to leverage "computational power on tap" provided by infrastructure clouds, i.e., allows the user to easily deploy resources across multiple private, community, and commercial clouds; provides high availability in that it allows users to replace failed resources; and scales to demand. The policies governing scaling are customizable based on system and application-specific indicators. We will describe the service architecture and implementation and discuss results obtained in the sustained deployment and management of thousands of virtual machines on EC2.