Semantic and Agent Technologies for Cloud Vendor Agnostic Resource Brokering

Abstract

The selection of Cloud providers, whose offers best fit the requirements of a particular application, is a complex issue due to the heterogeneity of the Cloud services, resources, technology and service levels offered by the several providers. In order to support this selection and requirements specification, we have developed, in the context of the mOSAIC project, a Knowledge Base, representing resources and domain concepts and rules by means of Semantic Web Ontologies and inference rules, a support tool, the Semantic Engine, that helps the user to abstract the requirements in vendor independent way starting from application requirements or from specific vendor resources, a Cloud Agency, that compares the different offers of providers with the user proposal and retrieves the best offer. In this paper, we illustrate how the two components, the Semantic Engine and the Cloud Agency, interoperate in order to support the Cloud Application Developer to express the requirements and services/resources in vendor agnostic way, to translate automatically these requirements into a neutral format in order to compare it with providers' offers and to broker the best one according to defined policies.