Heterogeneous resource management and orchestration in cloud environments

Abstract

The addition of heterogeneous resources to conventional homogeneous cloud environments has enabled clouds to embrace a wide variety of new applications that heretofore were traditionally confined to specialized computing environments. The enhanced and extended features offered by heterogeneous resources enable service offerings that pose challenges to traditional cloud management throughout the entire service delivery stack. The accelerated uptake of heterogeneous resources is exacerbating these challenges, which no longer can be efficiently addressed in an ad-hoc manner. Therefore, an integrated approach to heterogeneous resource management that is cognizant of the unique advantages of different hardware types is needed. In this paper, two candidate approaches, a platform-integration scheme and a server-integration scheme, are introduced to address this management challenge. The platform-integration scheme integrates and coordinates the management of various coexisting resource managers and associated environments each of which may be managing resources of different types using the most appropriate resource abstraction method. In contrast, the server-integration scheme provides a single, lower level, fine-grained management mechanism across all hardware resource types. Ultimately, the goal of each schemes is to provide a unified view of resources from a capability perspective to consumers.