Shahzad Pervez: Application-centric management of resources on the cloud

Cloud Computing Conference - Cloud Slam 2009.
Abstract. In the past when servers were within the enterprise boundaries there were fewer physical servers and it was easy to maintain a mapping of what applications are running on what servers (static servers) and their interdependencies. Now with virtualization unless you are running the actual datacenter, from the application owner perspective there is no concept of physical servers. And because of the virtualization there is no need to run multiple applications on the same server to increase server utilization, applications can run on dedicated virtual servers (server are dynamically allocated). This is why we believe for application owners to effectively manage the applications we need to raise the management abstraction level from infrastructure centric approach of the past to the application centric approach. We need to have an application centric approach for deploying, managing, and monitoring applications. A software which can provision optimal virtual servers, network, storage (storage, CPU, bandwidth, Memory, alt.) resources on-demand and provide automation and ease of use for application owners to be able easily and securely run and maintain their applications will be critical for the success of virtualization and cloud computing. In short we need to start managing systems for specific applications rather than managing servers and routers.

At Kaavo we have implemented an application centric approach to give the application owners more flexibility, control, visibility, automation, and security from their perspective to the infrastructure resources used by their applications. Now one can define a complete n-tier system, and then provision it in a fully automated manner using a single click. These multi-tier systems can be as complex as needed (e.g. we have n-tier systems consisting of a database tier with clustered databases, an application server tier with clusters of application servers, and a web tier with load balancers.) In addition, our monitoring module monitors the deployed systems, and then takes corrective actions as needed to re-provision the resources to meet the Service Level Agreements.

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