Software defined cloud: Survey, system and evaluation

Next generation cloud systems will require a paradigm shift in how they are constructed and managed.
Conventional control and management platforms are facing considerable challenges regarding flexibility,
dependability and security that next generation systems must handle. The cloud computing technology
has already contributed in alleviating a number of the problems associated with resource allocation,
utilization and management. However, many of the elements of a well-designed cloud environment
remain ‘‘stiff’’ and hard to modify and adapt in an integrated fashion. This includes the underlying
networking topologies, many aspects of the user control over IaaS, PaaS or SaaS layers, construction of
XaaS services, provenance and meta-data collection, to mention but few. In many situations the problem
may be due to inadequacy of service abstraction. Software Defined Systems (SDSys) is a concept that
help abstract the actual hardware at different layers with software components; one classical example of
this abstractions are hypervisors. Such abstraction provides an opportunity for system administrators
to construct and manage their systems, more easily, through flexible software layers. SDSys is an
umbrella for different software defined subsystems including Software Defined Networking (SDN),
Software Defined Storage (SDStorage), Software Defined Servers (Virtualization), Software Defined Data
Centers (SDDC), Software Defined Security (SDSec) etc. and ultimately Software Defined Clouds (SDCloud).
Individual solutions and seamless integration of these different abstractions remains in many respects
a challenge. In this paper, the authors introduce Software Defined Cloud (SDCloud), a novel software
defined cloud management framework that integrates different software defined cloud components to
handle complexities associated with cloud computing systems. The first part of paper presents, for the
first time, an extensive state of the art critical review of different components of software defined systems,
constructing the proposed SDCloud. The second part of the paper proposes the novel concept of SDCloud,
which is implemented and evaluated for its feasibility, flexibility and potential superiority.