Towards holistic cloud management

Despite significant attention and substantial efforts both in industry and academia, cloud computing has yet to reach its full potential. Commonly stated obstacles for cloud adoption include confusion due to multiple delivery models (SaaS, PaaS, IaaS) and deployment scenarios (public clouds, private clouds, cloud bursting etc.). Other frequent concerns relate to risks with outsourcing, data legislation issues, inability to assess trust in external providers, etc. In addition to these obstacles to cloud computing as a concept, there are also technical thresholds in today's cloud offerings, making cloud infrastructure provisioning and service lifecycle management tedious processes. We aim to address these issues by research in five main directions: cloud service lifecycle optimization, adapt ive self-preservation, self-management based on non-functional criteria, support for multiple cloud architectures, as well as market and legislative studies. The main outcome of our research is the OPTIMIS Toolkit, a set of flexible tools for service and infrastructure self-management.