Investigating Techniques for Automating the Selection of Cloud Infrastructure Services

The Cloud infrastructure services landscape advances steadily leaving users in the agony of choice. As a result, Cloud service identification and discovery remains a hard problem due to different service descriptions, nonstandardised naming conventions and heterogeneous types and features of Cloud services. In this paper, analysis the research challenges and present a Web Ontology Language (OWL) based ontology, the Cloud Computing Ontology (CoCoOn). It defines functional and non-functional concepts, attributes and relations of infrastructure services. We also present a system, CloudRecommender, that implements our domain ontology in a relational model. The system uses regular expressions and Structured Query Language (SQL) for matching user requests to service descriptions. We briefly describe the architecture of the CloudRecommender system, and demonstrate its effectiveness and scalability through a service configuration selection experiment based on a set of prominent Cloud providers’ descriptions including Amazon, Azure, and GoGrid.