Monitoring and abstraction for networked clouds

We consider the problem of building tightly coupled network and cloud management systems for “carrier clouds” based on an abstract view of the dynamic network state. Optimized resource placement in distributed clouds requires information about the internal network topology and state, in addition to other data center information. We present a distributed cloud system that accesses such data in an abstract way using the Application Layer Traffic Optimization (ALTO) protocol. The demonstration addresses how dynamic networking information can be gathered, how it can be abstracted and coupled with other data such as data center load, how it can be exposed, and how it can be integrated into a cloud management system. Our distributed cloud solution demonstrates that ALTO is well-suited for infrastructure-to-application information exposure.