Rapid adjustment and adoption to MIaaS clouds

Abstract

Emerging Managed Infrastructure as a Service (MIaaS) clouds allow enterprises to outsource their IT infrastructure as well as their IT management needs. One of the core tenets of a MIaaS cloud is a standardized service delivery model, allowing the cloud provider to provide infrastructure management services at a lower cost. As opposed to pure IaaS clouds where arbitrary customer virtual machines can be migrated to the cloud, migration to MIaaS clouds require the customer servers to be adapted in a way such that the cloud steady state management stack can manage these virtual machines using the standardized delivery model. In this work, we address the problem of migrating customer workloads to a standardized MIaaS cloud. We present the design and implementation of Rapid Adjustment Engine (RAE). RAE captures the adjustment process across arbitrary customer servers with high diversity in a unified rule framework. It uses rapid image adjustment to reduce the end-to-end migration time and a flexible orchestrator framework to integrate diverse functionalities and associated tools in a single migration process. Our experimental evaluation establishes the ability of RAE to enable rapid, reliable and reduced cost migration to MIaaS clouds. © 2012 ACM.