Infrastructure as runtime models: Towards Model-Driven resource management

The importance of continuous delivery and the emergence of tools allowing to treat infrastructure configurations programmatically have revolutionized the way computing resources and software systems are managed. However, these tools keep lacking an explicit model representation of underlying resources making it difficult to introspect, verify or reconfigure the system in response to external events. In this paper, we outline a novel approach that treats system infrastructure as explicit runtime models. A key benefit of using such models@run.time representation is that it provides a uniform semantic foundation for resources monitoring and reconfiguration. Adopting models at runtime allows one to integrate different aspects of system management, such as resource monitoring and subsequent verification into an unified view which would otherwise have to be done manually and require to use different tools. It also simplifies the development of various self-adaptation strategies without requiring the engineers and researchers to cope with low-level system complexities.