Layering of the Provenance Data for Cloud Computing

With the recent advancements in distributed systems, Cloud computing has emerged as a model for enabling convenient, on-demand network access to a shared resource pool of configurable elements such as (networks, servers, storage, applications, and services). Various applications are developed and deployed into the Cloud following the layered architecture. The layered approach includes infrastructure, virtualization, application, platform and client tiers. Provenance (the meta-data), is the information that helps cloud providers and users to determine the derivation history of a data product, starting from its origin. Each layer in the Cloud has its own provenance data and generally, provenance data for each layer address different audience. For example, Cloud providers are interested in the infrastructure provenance data to verify the high utilization of resources through audit trials. Cloud users on the other hand are interested in the performance of the deployed application and the verification of experiments. In this paper, we present various queries regarding the provenance data for different layers of Cloud. Hereby, we integrate the provenance data from individual layers and highlight the importance of integrated provenance. We also outline the relationship between various layers of the Cloud by using the integrated provenance.