Applicability of the Willow Architecture for Cloud Management

The differences between grids and clouds arguably include objectives, organization, scale, and workload. By examining these fundamental characteristics and requirements in detail, the authors assess the degree to which a generic management infrastructure for grid computing can be applied to cloud infrastructures. The analysis is further refined by considering a specific management system, Willow, which they have recently successfully applied to grid management. Three distinct architectures are evaluated: wholly within the datacenter transparent to users; completely within the user software stack and transparent to the cloud provider; and, a hybrid in which the system is known to both the provider and the users.