Towards an Environment for Efficient and Transparent Virtual Machine Operations: The ENTICE Approach

Cloud computing is based on Virtual Machines (VM) or containers, which provide their own software execution environment that can be deployed by facilitating technologies on top of various physical hardware. The use of VMs or containers represents an efficient way to automatize the overall software engineering and operation life-cycle. Some of the benefits include elasticity and high scalability, which increases the utilization efficiency and decreases the operational costs. VMs or containers as software artifacts are created using provider-specific templates and are stored in proprietary or public repositories for further use. However, technology specific choices may reduce their portability, lead to a vendor lock-in, particularly when applications need to run in federated Clouds. In this paper we present the current state of development of the novel concept of a VM repository and operational environment for federated Clouds named ENTICE. The ENTICE environment has been designed to receive unmodified and functionally complete VM images from its users, and transparently tailor and optimise them for specific Cloud infrastructures with respect to their size, configuration, and geographical distribution, such that they are loaded, delivered, and executed faster and with improved QoS compared to their current behaviour. Furthermore, in this work a specific use case scenario for the ENTICE environment has been provided and the underlying novel technologies have been presented.