Towards a richer model of cloud app markets

Major cloud providers have recently been building cloud markets, which serve as a hosting platform for VMs pre-installed with a variety of software stacks. Clients of cloud computing leverage such markets by downloading and instantiating the VMs that best suit their computing needs, thereby saving the effort needed to configure and build VMs from scratch. This vision paper argues for a richer model of cloud markets. We envision a market of VM apps that can interact with client VMs in a rich set of ways to provide a number of services that are currently supported only by cloud providers. For example, clients can use VM apps to deploy virtual machine introspection-based security tools and various network middleboxes on their work VMs without requiring the cloud provider to deploy these services on their behalf. This paper presents a taxonomy of VM apps, analyzes the key requirements needed to realize such VM apps, and explores the design and trade-offs of various options to implement VM apps.