A cloud services composition approach based on customer's models and cloud services vendor's rules and specifications

Abstract

Cloud Computing is going to be the next IT. Using Cloud services has become a key action to carry out the business strategy to the next level, whether for academic institutions or industry, small or large scale businesses. For a Cloud Service Vendor (CSV), to build a Cloud software solution, in most situations an atomic Cloud service could not meet all customer's requirements, due to its basic offered functionality. Thus, CSV ought to have efficient Cloud services composition techniques and tools to handle customer's excessive requests for Cloud services-based software solutions. Cloud services composition is a research area that has emerged in the last few years. However, the available Cloud services composition approaches are oriented to be used by Cloud users. In literature, basically, these approaches are only based on user's preferences to propose a Cloud solution that meets user's needs. This paper aims to demonstrate our initial work to propose a novel Cloud services composition approach which is based on the injection of customer models and CSV rules and specifications during the composition process stages. Our proposed approach is designed to be used by CSVs. To demonstrate its feasibility, we suggest a primal framework architecture. Which is designed by four key components. Firstly, throughout the GUI component, the CSV submits a request that expresses customer preferences, and CSV rules and specifications. After handling the request, the framework core component will either look up the candidate Cloud services in its own local repository or collaborates with third-party CSVs. Secondly, once the right services discovered and selected, at the composition stage, the framework will inject a set of CSV composition rules and specifications combined with a set of customer preferences. Finally, the framework core will launch an execution plan to build a workflow diagram-which formalizes the outcome composite Cloud service-that will be displayed in the GUI.