A cloud-based management system for distributed datacenters provides remote management of the datacenters from terminals at various locations. A virtual cloud-based operating system facilitates a transparent system call architecture, permitting subscribers to deploy, configure and manage operations at machines operating on different local operating systems. The virtual operating system can canonicalize available resources into a namespace to expose the resources as files at terminals. Asynchronous execution of subscriber commands across a group of target machines is provided with a notification procedure to control bandwidth and resource allocation. A file distribution model without a central controller for a group of target machines is provided to alleviate interaction with the management cluster for file distribution.