Foundations of Efficient Virtual Appliance Based Service Deployments

Virtual appliances store the required information (e.g disk images) to instantiate a functional virtual machine on Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) cloud systems. Large appliance size obstructs IaaS systems to deliver dynamic and scalable infrastructures that can host flexible solutions for services deployment. Thus, the current solutions suffer from several disadvantages: (i) the slow deployment time of services in virtual machines, and (ii) virtual appliances crafted by developers tend to be inefficient for deployment purposes. This book addresses problem (i) with a virtual appliance distribution technique that first identifies appliance parts and their internal dependencies. Then based on service demand it efficiently distributes the identified parts to virtual appliance repositories. Problem (ii) is targeted with the Automated Virtual appliance creation Service (AVS) that can extract and publish an already deployed service by the developer. This newly acquired appliance is optimized for service deployment time with the virtual appliance optimization facility that utilizes active fault injection to remove the non-functional parts of the appliance.