Distributed environment for efficient virtual machine image management in federated Cloud architectures.

The use of virtual machines (VMs) in Cloud computing provides various benefits in the overall software engineering lifecycle. These include efficient elasticity mechanisms resulting in higher resource utilization and lower operational costs. The VMs as software artifacts are created using provider-specific templates, called virtual machine images (VMI), and are stored in proprietary or public repositories for further use. However, some technology-specific choices can limit the interoperability among various Cloud providers and bundle the VMIs with nonessential or redundant software packages, leading to increased storage size, prolonged VMI delivery, stagnant VMI instantiation, and ultimately vendor lock-in. To address these challenges, we present a set of novel functionalities and design approaches for efficient operation of distributed VMI repositories, specifically tailored for enabling (1) simplified creation of lightweight and size optimized VMIs tuned for specific application requirements; (2) multi-objective VMI repository optimization; and (3) efficient reasoning mechanism to help optimizing complex VMI operations. The evaluation results confirm that the presented approaches can enable VMI size reduction by up to 55%, while trimming the image creation time by 66%. Furthermore, the repository optimization algorithms can reduce the VMI delivery time by up to 51% and cut down the storage expenses by 3%. Moreover, by implementing replication strategies, the optimization algorithms can increase the system reliability by 74%.