A Cloud Provisioning System for Deploying Complex Application Services

Cloud Computing, with its on-demand provisioning capability on shared resources, has emerged as a new paradigm for reducing IT costs. In this paper, we present the architecture of a provisioning system that simplifies the deployment of complex application services on a Cloud infrastructure. We will introduce the concept of Composite Appliance and explain how it can be implemented and utilized to simplify management tasks and to reduce costs. We illustrate the extensibility and advantages of our design with a prototype solution consisting of a 3-tier application services that are deployed and configured automatically without manual intervention on a set of virtual machines instances in a Cloud.