A Research Roadmap for Bringing Continuous Quality Assurance and Optimization to Cloud Service Brokers

Cloud service intermediation is becoming increasingly recognized as a key component of the cloud computing value chain. Existing cloud service intermediaries already offer capabilities such as integration, customization or aggregation brokerage, but in the future, enterprises will require much more sophisticated capabilities going far beyond what is available today. The types of brokerage capabilities foreseen to be most valuable for service consumers, and at the same time most demanding for future enterprise service brokers to implement, are those addressing continuous quality assurance and optimization of cloud services. In this paper, we present a research roadmap for bringing continuous quality assurance and optimization capabilities closer to the reach of enterprise cloud service brokers. We present a scenario for motivating the need for such capabilities, as well as a discussion of the dominant views on cloud service brokerage.