Extending OCCI for autonomic management in the cloud

Cloud Computing is an emerging paradigm involving different kinds of Information Technologies (IT) services. One of the major advantages of this paradigm resides on its pay-as-you-go economic model. To remain efficient, it becomes necessary to couple this model with autonomic computing. By autonomic computing we mean the ability of the system to automatically and dynamically manage its resources to respond to the requirements of the business based on Service Level Agreement (SLA). In this paper, we propose an extension for Open Cloud Computing Interface (OCCI) to support the different aspects of autonomic computing. This OCCI extension describes new Resources and Links that are generic Kinds and are specialized using OCCI Mixins. We introduce the Autonomic Manager as a special Resource that starting from a SLA instantiates all needed entities to automatically establish an infrastructure to enable an autonomic management of Cloud resources. The other introduced OCCI Resources are: Analyzer to analyze monitoring data based on specific analysis rules and Reconfiguration Manager to generate reconfiguration actions based on reconfiguration strategies. These Resources are linked using new defined Link entities. We describe herein, a real use case to show that we can apply our approach to the different levels of the Cloud (i.e., laaS, PaaS and SaaS) at the same time. We present also the implementation details as well as evaluation preliminary results that are encouraging. (C) 2016 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.