Cloud computing provides users near instant access to seemingly unlimited resources, and provides service providers the opportunity to deploy complex information technology infrastructure, as a service, to their customers. Providers benet from economies of scale and multiplexing gains aorded by sharing of resources through virtualization of the underlying physical infrastructure. However, the scale and highly dynamic nature of cloud platforms impose signicant new challenges to cloud service

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... iders. In particular, realizing sophisticated cloud services requires a cloud control framework that can orchestrate cloud resource provisioning, conguration, utilization and decommissioning across a distributed set of physical resources. In this paper we advocate a data-centric approach to cloud orchestration. Following this approach, cloud resources are modeled as structured data that can be queried by a declarative language, and updated with well-dened transactional semantics. We examine the feasibility, benets and challenges of the approach, and present our design and prototype implementation of the Data-centric Management Framework (DMF) as a solution, with data models, query languages and semantics that are specically designed for cloud resource orchestration.