Cloud Architectures and Management Approaches

An overview of the traditional three-layer cloud architecture is presented as background for motivating the transition to clouds containing heterogeneous resources. Whereas this transition adds many important features to the cloud, including improved service delivery and reduced energy consumption, it also results in a number of challenges associated with the efficient management of these new and diverse resources. The CloudLightning architecture is proposed as a candidate for addressing this emerging complexity, and a description of its components and their relationships is given.