Conductor: Orchestrating the clouds

Cloud computing enables customers to access virtually unlimited resources on demand and without any fixed upfront cost. However, the commoditization of computing resources imposes new challenges in how to manage them: customers of cloud services are no longer restricted to the resources they own, but instead choose from a variety of different services offered by different providers, and the impact of these choices on price and overall performance is not always clear. Furthermore, having to take into account new cloud products and services, the cost of recovering from faults, or price fluctuations due to spot markets makes the picture even more unclear. This position paper highlights a series of challenges that must be overcome in order to allow customers to better lever-age cloud resources. We also make the case for a system called Conductor that automatically manages resources in cloud computing to meet user-specifiable optimization goals, such as minimizing monetary cost or completion time. Finally, we discuss some of the challenges we will face in building such a system.