Toward a meta-model for elasticity management in cloud applications

Cloud computing has emerged as a new computational model in which software is hosted, run and administered in large web data centers and provided as a service. Therefore, elasticity is the most important challenge in cloud environments because it aims at adapting the workload changes by provisioning and de-provisioning resources, such that the available resources match the current need. To address the challenges of the automated elasticity management, a structured approach should be used to provide an abstract level of elasticity description and autonomic approach for self-management. In this paper, we propose a generic meta-model for automated elasticity management. We aim to combine between two approaches: Model-Driven Architecture (MDA) based approach to provide a generic meta-model for elasticity management and a MAPE-K loop approach to automate the process of elasticity management. The proposed approach is illustrated through an Ambient Healthcare Monitoring System (AHMS) application.