Transparent Clouds: An Enhancement to Abstraction
With the introduction of various hardware/software technologies such as Cloud Technologies or Virtualization technologies, there has been a great potential to reuse ICT resources. These technologies also provide various advantages including resource consumption reduction (in the use phase only or in the whole life cycle). In addition, there are additional potentials regarding the resource opacity introduced by these technologies. These potentials could improve cloud solutions and enable tweakability of components' nonessential features that may be not captured in the component models. This is especially of great advantage in the case of heterogeneous/disaggregated infrastructure where developing comprehensive models to cover everything is practically impossible. In this work, by leveraging on the concept of pathways, we develop a few mechanisms that enable transparency and therefore tweakability of features even in the presence of abstraction and heterogeneity. In particular, the layered-stack approach to system decomposition is considered because of its association with software defined networking (SDN). For a concrete example, the case of dynamic frequency scaling of processors is considered and it is shown that the associated consumption could be considerably reduced without requiring additional changes to the middle-layer components.