SBIR Phase I: ITScript: A Language for Cloud Management

The broader impact/commercial potential of this Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Phase I project will be to increase the reliability of existing cloud applications, while also lowering the barrier to entry to cloud operations for less technically sophisticated users. The rapid growth of cloud computing over the past decade has made enterprise-scale IT infrastructure available to companies of all sizes, but the ability of most companies to effectively leverage those resources significantly trails the technological leap that cloud computing represents. The goal of this project is to address these deficiencies by designing and implementing a high-level, declarative programming language that infrastructure operators can use to manage their cloud deployments. Using this language and its accompanying abstractions will reduce application downtime due to operator error, enable operators to more easily and quickly update cloud deployments, and make applications portable across cloud providers. This Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Phase I project advances the techniques for managing complex, large-scale systems on cloud platforms. Existing cloud management platforms are based on low-level abstractions, such as individual virtual machines, and do not give operators a way to describe the high-level structure of cloud deployments. By taking a language-based approach to the problems of cloud management, this project will produce robust cloud abstractions that will handle the low-level details of cloud operations. In addition to facilitating manual administration, these abstractions will serve as a basis for more sophisticated cloud control programs than are possible today.