Managing clouds: A case for a fresh look at large unreliable dynamic networks

Peer-to-peer (P2P) protocols have proven efficient to provide scalable support to many large-scale distributed applications, successfully coping with unreliability and dynamics. However, to exploit them in a wider range of environments, such as very large-scale networks of smartphones or set-top boxes, it is imperative to make P2P protocols manageable: we need to be able to start, bootstrap and stop protocols, and assign resources dynamically. In this paper we present a general-purpose framework aimed to support several fully distributed applications running independently over a very large scale and dynamic pool of resources. We call this resource pool a cloud. The basic idea of the framework is a declarative application suit description, that describes what applications should be running on what resources, and a middleware that makes sure the currently available and dynamic cloud self-organizes into the configuration represented by the description, creating the subclouds that are assi...