CloudMap: A Visual Notation for Representing and Managing Cloud Resources

Abstract

With the vast proliferation of cloud computing technologies, DevOps are inevitably faced with managing large amounts of complex cloud resource configurations. This involves being able to proficiently understand and analyze cloud resource attributes and relationships, and make decisions on demand. However, a majority of cloud tools encode resource descriptions and monitoring and control scripts in tedious textual formats. This presents complex and overwhelming challenges for DevOps to manually read, and iteratively build a mental representation especially when it involves a large number of cloud resources. To alleviate these frustrations we propose a model-driven notation to visually represent, monitor and control cloud resource configurations; managed underneath by existing cloud resource orchestration tools such as Docker. We propose a mindmap-based interface and set of visualization patterns. We have employed an extensive user-study to base design decisions, and validate our work based on experimentation with real-world scenarios. The results show significant productivity and efficiency improvements.