A Resource Design Framework to Realize Intent-Based Cloud Management

More businesses and organizations are choosing clouds to accommodate their workload, e.g., annalistic departments of enterprises use public/private cloud to deploy the analysis function of data, and telecommunication operators deploy Virtual Network Functions (NFVs) such as virtual Evolved Packet Core (vEPC) on clouds to provide telecommunication services. When utilizing the cloud, the cloud user is concerned about the functionality, reliability, performance, etc. of the cloud-based function, which we call the intent or the service requirements. However, to meet the intent, the user needs to tell the cloud resource orchestrator/controller what kinds of Virtual Machines (VMs) are needed and the amount of computing resources necessary to allocate to each VM, which we call resource requirements. In our preliminary work [1], we addressed this problem and proposed an Intent-Based Cloud Management (IBCM) framework to "translate" the cloud user's service requirements into resource requirements. In this work, we have focused on realizing a Resource Design Framework (RDF) for IBCM that decides the needed computing resource amount to fulfill the cloud user' intent/ service requirements. The main contributions of this work are as follows: (1) We have systematically analyzed factors that need to be taken into consideration when designing the resources. (2) On the basis of the analysis, we propose the architecture of RDF that is applicable for various cloud-based applications and scenarios. To the best of knowledge, this is the first work to address this issue. (3) We have validated the proposed RDF in an experimental cloud-based machine learning scenario. The experiment results show our RDF is able to infer the performance and operation state with over 90% precision, thus enabling resources to be precisely designed in accordance with performance requirements and operation policy. (4) In addition to precise resource design, we also proposed a service level agreement (SLA) violation prevention mechanism for RDF and verified its effectiveness.