Cloud Hopper: A Unified Cloud Solution to Manage Heterogeneous Clouds

Abstract

Cloud environments are built on virtualization platforms which offer scalability, on-demand pricing, high performance, elasticity, easy accessibility of the resources and cost efficient services. Most of the small and large businesses use cloud computing to take advantage of these features. The usage of the cloud resources depends on the requirements of the organizations. With the advent of cloud computing, the traditional way of handling machines by the IT professionals has decreased. However, it leads to wastage of resources due to inadequate monitoring and improper management of resources. Often it happens that the cloud resources once deployed are forgotten, and they stay running until someone manually intervenes to shut them down. This results in continuous consumption of the resources and incurs costs which is known as Cloud Sprawling. Many organizations use resources provided by multiple cloud providers and maintains multiple accounts on them. The problem of cloud sprawling proliferates when there are multiple accounts on different cloud providers are not managed properly. In this thesis, a solution to overcome the problem of cloud sprawling is presented. A unified console to monitor and manage all the resources such as compute instances, and storage deployed on multiple cloud providers is provided. This console provides the details of the resources in use and ability to manage them without logging into the different accounts they belong to. Moreover, a provision to schedule multiple tasks is provided from the scheduling tasks panel. In this way the resources can be queued to run at a specific time and can also be torn down at a scheduled time, thus the resources are not left unattended. Before terminating, a facility to archive files, and directories on virtual machines is also provided using storage services offered by both IaaS and SaaS providers.Further, a notification system helps in notifying the user about the statuses of the scheduled tasks thus helping enterprises in saving on the costs.