Optimal Provisioning in the Cloud. Technical report of the Aeolus project

Complex distributed systems are classically assembled by deploying several existing software components to multiple servers. Building such systems is a challenging problem that requires a significant amount of problem solving as one must i) ensure that all inter-component dependencies are satisfied; ii) ensure that no conflicting components are deployed on the same machine; and iii) take into account replication and distribution to account for quality of service, or possible failure of some services. We propose a tool, Zephyrus, that automates to a great extent assembling complex distributed systems. Given i) a high level specification of the desired system architecture, ii) the set of available components and their requirements) and iii) the current state of the system, Zephyrus is able to generate a formal representation of the desired system, to place the components in an optimal manner on the available machines, and to interconnect them as needed.