LMS: Label Management Service for intent-driven Cloud Management

Abstract

Today's cloud infrastructure is often overwhelmed by inputs from multiple users and administrators for enforcing the policies on which to run cloud services, and infrastructure administrators need to configure policies on different resource types such as compute, network, etc. Such complex policy enforcement decisions from multiple users could result in errors and conflicts. To mitigate such complexities in managing cloud infrastructure, there is a strong push towards decoupling high level intents ("what" should be done) from the underlying infrastructure implementations ("how" to do it). Unlike existing solutions which resolve conflicts at low level during run-time, intent-based systems aim to resolve potential conflicts at the intent specification level. To efficiently handle large scale cloud environments, we propose a Label Management Service (LMS) which provides meaningful abstractions and their relationships by analyzing target cloud infrastructure. It helps the cloud administrators to model their policy requirements efficiently by decoupling the intents from underlying specifics. LMS scales to large dynamic cloud environments and manages the life cycle of label-based intent and enforcement.