Masc: Matching Alternative Services in the Cloud

Cloud computing enables the automated creation of business applications from independently developed and deployed services. Mechanisms are thus needed to select service components that meet or exceed the functional and non-functional requirements of such applications. The primary objective of service selection in the Cloud could be viewed as the maximization of an application-specific utility function that matches the constraints of the service requester against the capabilities and offerings of the service provider(s). In this paper, we propose such an approach that computes the match between service requests and offerings, based on their functional and non-functional properties in an efficient manner (in terms of space and time complexity). The proposed technique incorporates behavior monitoring of potential matches to ensure enhanced application-specific utility. We compare our approach with similar existing approaches to show its applicability and performance.