Supporting cloud service operation management for elasticity

Abstract

Complex cloud services rely on various IaaS, PaaS, and SaaS cloud offerings. Fast (re)deployment and testing cycles, and the rapidity of changes of various dependent infrastructures and services, imply a need for continuous adaptation. Although software-based elasticity control solutions can automate various decisions through intelligent decision-making processes, in many cases, such adaptation requires interactions among different cloud service provider employees and among different providers. However, decisions from stakeholders and elasticity software controllers should be seamlessly integrated. In this paper, we analyze the needs of service providers and the possible interactions in elasticity operations management that should be supported. We focus on interactions between service provider employees and elasticity controllers, and propose novel interaction protocols considering various organization roles and their concerns from the elasticity control point of view. We introduce the elasticity Operations Management Platform (eOMP) which supports seamless interactions among service provider employees and software controllers. eOMP provides elasticity directives to enable notifications for complex elasticity issues to be solved by service provider employees, and the necessary mechanisms for managing cloud service elasticity. Our experiments show that service provider employees can easily interact with elasticity controllers, and, according to their responsibilities, take part in the elasticity control to address issues which may arise at runtime for complex software services.