Resource and Scheduling Management in Cloud ( 1 of 2)

A key challenge faced by providers when building a cloud infrastructure is managing physical and virtual resources according to user-resources' demands, with respect to the access time to the associated servers, the capacity needed for storage and the heterogeneity aspects traversing different networks in a holistic fashion. The organisation or, namely, the orchestration of resources must be performed in a way that rapidly and dynamically provides resources to applications.

Some challenges:

One can easily argue whether a company or an organisational body would be offering better services if these services can be easily migrated to the cloud. It is undoubtedly true that the cloud services present a simplistic view of IT in the case of IaaS or a simplistic view of programming notations in the case of PaaS or even a simplistic view of resources manipulation and utilisation in the case of SaaS. However, the underlying communicating mechanisms comprising of heterogeneous systems are formed in a highly complex way.

Managing Cloud resources:

Cloud resource management refers to the allocation of cloud resources, such as processor power, memory capacity and network bandwidth. The resource management system is the system responsible for allocating the cloud resources to users and applications. For any resource management system to become successful, it needs to flexibly utilise the available cloud resources whilst maintaining service isolation. The resource management system is expected to operate under the predefined QoS requirements as set by the customers. For this, resource management at cloud scale requires a rich set of resource management schemes that are capable to manage efficiently the provision of QoS requirements whilst maintaining total system efficiency. The greatest challenge for this optimisation problem is that of scalability.