Title: Addressing the interoperability in cloud: the vendor agent

Authors: Alba Amato; Luca Tasquier; Adrian Copie

Addresses: Department of Industrial and Information Engineering, Second University of Naples, Via Roma, 29, Aversa, Italy ' Department of Industrial and Information Engineering, Second University of Naples, Via Roma, 29, Aversa, Italy ' Research Institute e-Austria, Timisoara, (IeAT), B-dul Vasile Parvan, 4, Timisoara, Romania

Abstract: Cloud computing has made the use of IT services more accessible and cheap. Resources are easily configurable and accessible using networked client devices and are characterised by particular agility and efficiency of use that allows to scale dynamically and on demand. However, owing to the current lack of standards and to the heterogeneity of technologies, users have little flexibility in choosing from alternative providers simultaneously in order to optimise resources at different levels so being affected by the vendor lock-in problem. In this paper, we address the problem of interoperability at IaaS level by proposing an agent abstraction, the vendor agent that is a wrapper to a specific provider technology, and its implementation to support two well-known cloud platforms: Open Nebula and Amazon. This abstraction represents a key driver towards interoperability giving users the opportunity to choose and use services provided by many different cloud vendors.

Keywords: interoperability; provisioning; cloud computing; vendor agents; IaaS; infrastructure as a service; agent abstraction; cloud vendors; cloud services; vendor lock-in.

DOI: 10.1504/IJCSE.2015.071357

International Journal of Computational Science and Engineering, 2015 Vol.11 No.1, pp.5 - 16

Received: 04 Dec 2012
Accepted: 23 May 2013
Published online: 22 Aug 2015 *

Full-text access for editors Full-text access for subscribers Purchase this article Comment on this article