Standards-Based Cloud Service Management

From a Master Thesis to CLOSER 2013

In the scope of a Master Thesis collaboration between the Université de Liège (ULg) – Electrical Engineering and Computer Science Department  and EURA NOVA, we have been working last year on cloud standard of service interoperability. This work has been summarized in a paper [1] accepted in the poster session at 3rd International Conference on Cloud Computing and Services Science, CLOSER 2013.  The goal of this project was to contribute on solving the lock-in problem inherent to current cloud offerings. We based our solution on open  cloud standards, mainly OCCI.

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Towards a standards-based cloud service manager

Migrating services to the cloud brings all the benefits of elasticity, scalability and cost-cutting. However, migrating services among different cloud infrastructures or outside of the cloud is not an obvious task. In addition, distributing services among multiple cloud providers, or on a hybrid installation requires a custom implementation effort that must be repeated at each infrastructure change. This situation raises the lock-in problem and discourages cloud adoption. Cloud computing open standards were designed to face this situation and to bring interoperability and portability to cloud environments. However, they target isolated resources, and do not take into account the notion of complete services. In this paper, we introduce an extension to OCCI, a cloud computing open standard, in order to support complete service definition and management automation. We support this proposal with an open-source framework for service management through compliant cloud infrastructures.

Amine Ghrab, Sabri Skhiri, Hervé Kœner, and Guy Ledu, Towards A Standards-Based Cloud Service Manager, proceedings of the 3rd International Conference on Cloud Computing and Services Science, CLOSER 2013, Aachen, Germany, May 2013.

Click here to access the paper.