Decentralised Repositories for Transparent and Efficient Virtual Machine Operations

Abstract

ENTICE is an H2020 European project aiming to research and create a novel Virtual Machine (VM) repository and operational environment for federated Cloud infrastructures to: (i) simplify the creation of lightweight and highly optimised VM images tuned for functional descriptions of applications; (ii) automatically decompose and distribute VM images based on multi-objective optimisation (performance, economic costs, storage size, and QoS needs) and a knowledge base and reasoning infrastructure to meet application runtime requirements; and (iii) elastically auto-scale applications on Cloud resources based on their fluctuating load with optimised VM interoperability across Cloud infrastructures and without provider lock-in, in order to finally fulfil the promises that virtualization technology has failed to deliver so far. In this chapter, we give an inside view into the ENTICE project architecture. Based on stakeholders that interact with ENTICE, we describe the different functionalities of the different components and services and how they interact with each other.