Toward a Cloud Operating System

Cloud computing is characterized today by a hotchpotch of elements and solutions, namely operating systems running on a single virtualized computing environment, middleware layers that attempt to combine physical and virtualized resources from multiple operating systems, and specialized application engines that leverage a key asset of the cloud service provider (e.g. Google's BigTable). Yet, there does not exists a virtual distributed operating system that ties together these cloud resources into a unified processing environment that is easy to program, flexible, scalable, self-managed, and dependable.