Cloud Portability and Interoperability ― Issues and Current Trends

This book offers readers a quick, comprehensive and up-to-date overview of the most important methodologies, technologies, APIs and standards related to the portability and interoperability of cloud applications and services, illustrated by a number of use cases representing a variety of interoperability and portability scenarios.

The lack of portability and interoperability between cloud platforms at different service levels is the main issue affecting cloud-based services today. The brokering, negotiation, management, monitoring and reconfiguration of cloud resources are challenging tasks for developers and users of cloud applications due to the different business models associated with resource consumption, and to the variety of services and features offered by different cloud providers.

In chapter 1 the concepts of cloud portability and interoperability are introduced, together with the issues and limitations arising when such features are lacking or ignored. Subsequently, chapter 2 provides an overview of the state-of-the-art methodologies and technologies that are currently used or being explored to enable cloud portability and interoperability. Chapter 3 illustrates the main cross-platform cloud APIs and how they can solve interoperability and portability issues. In turn, chapter 4 presents a set of ready-to-use solutions which, either because of their broad-scale use in cloud computing scenarios or because they utilize established or emerging standards, play a fundamental part in providing interoperable and portable solutions. Lastly, chapter 5 presents an overview of emerging standards for cloud Interoperability and portability.

Researchers and developers of cloud-based services will find here a brief survey of the relevant methodologies, APIs and standards, illustrated by case studies and complemented by an extensive reference list for more detailed descriptions of every topic covered.

Beniamino Di Martino is Full Professor of Information Systems and Vice Director of the Department of Industrial and Information Engineering at the Second University of Naples (Italy). He is the project coordinator of the EU funded project “mOSAIC - Open-Source API and Platform for Multiple Clouds”. He is a member of the IEEE Working Group on Cloud Interoperability Standard, of the Cloud Standards Customer Council, and of the Cloud Computing Experts' Group of the European Commission - Internet of Services, Software and Virtualization Unit. He has been Vice Chair of the Executive Board of the IEEE CS Technical Committee on Scalable Computing.

Giuseppina Cretella received her PhD in Computer and Electronic Engineering from the Second University of Naples. She is involved in research activities dealing with Semantic Web and Semantic Web Services, Knowledge Discovery, Reverse Engineering and Cloud Computing. She participated in research projects such as: mOSAIC EC FP7 project, CoSSMic Smart Cities EC FP7 and Cloud@Home.

Antonio Esposito is a Ph.D. student at the Second University of Naples. He is participating to the CoSSMic Smart Cities EC FP7 project. His main research activities are in Software Engineering, Cloud Computing, Design and Cloud Patterns, Semantic based Information Retrieval.