CloudView: Describe and maintain resource view in cloud

Resource view is the user defined table to provide specific view on resource status in cloud computing environment. It provides a convenient way to retrieve resource data for applications at infrastructure, platform and service layers. But the description and maintenance of these diverse resource views are inconvenient and dramatically difficult due to massive, heterogeneous and dynamic characteristics of the cloud resources involved. In this paper we present a resource view description scheme RQL and the corresponding system CloudView to address these difficulties. RQL provides users a scheme to specify the data processing flow from resource raw data collected to resource view data objected. By constructing data processing acyclic graph based on view definitions and using basic routines, view maintenance mechanism update user defined resource views automatically and periodically. CloudView use a centralized scheduler to distribute maintenance jobs to a set of scalable worker nodes. It leverages distributed key-value database to store view data. Compared to related resource monitoring and discovering systems, CloudView is flexible in application oriented view description and maintenance. Experiments show it updates typical user defined views with desired performance.