Virtual machine image (VMI) management has become one of the key infrastructure components in Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) cloud systems. Any “good” VMI management system should support flexible and efficient VMI services to cloud users, and offer scalable, easy-to-maintain and efficient VMI management for cloud providers. While there have been a number of systems and optimizations for VMI management, this paper investigates a declarative and data-centric approach to VMI management for both cloud users and providers. Specifically, by viewing VMI management as a data-intensive application, we propose Hemera, a novel VMI management system prototype based on relational database systems. Hemera adopts a data-centric approach to VMI management system design, where a VMI is modeled as structured data. With the data-centric approach, the key operations of VMI management can be recast naturally as programs based on SQL language. Moreover, Hemera embraces a series of automatic optimization opportunities with their root from databases. We have developed a system prototype based on MySQL. Our experimental results show the efficiency and feasibility of our declarative and data-centric approach to VMI Management.

中文翻译：

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在 IaaS 云中实现声明式和以数据为中心的虚拟机映像管理

虚拟机映像 (VMI) 管理已成为基础架构即服务 (IaaS) 云系统中的关键基础架构组件之一。任何“好的”VMI 管理系统都应该为云用户提供灵活高效的 VMI 服务，并为云提供商提供可扩展、易于维护和高效的 VMI 管理。尽管有许多用于 VMI 管理的系统和优化，但本文研究了一种面向云用户和提供商的 VMI 管理声明式和以数据为中心的方法。具体而言，通过将 VMI 管理视为数据密集型应用程序，我们提出了 Hemera，这是一种基于关系数据库系统的新型 VMI 管理系统原型。Hemera 采用以数据为中心的 VMI 管理系统设计方法，其中 VMI 被建模为结构化数据。通过以数据为中心的方法，VMI管理的关键操作可以很自然的改写成基于SQL语言的程序。此外，Hemera 拥有一系列源自数据库的自动优化机会。我们开发了一个基于MySQL的系统原型。我们的实验结果显示了我们的声明式和以数据为中心的 VMI 管理方法的效率和可行性。