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Cloud brokerage: a key enabler for widespread cloud usage

Published: 02 September 2013 Publication History

Abstract

Cloud applications can be seen as composed of services, and the owner of an application has to identify, verify, test, and select the services of the particular business workflow or application to be implemented. This is a knowledge intensive task, which might be outside a company's normal expertise and, especially for small and medium sized enterprises, hamper the ability to reap the Cloud benefits in terms of cost savings and performance elasticity. In the Nordic markets, the majority companies are relatively small.
Furthermore, an application is no longer build once and for all since its individual services can be replaced by equivalent services that are better or cheaper, as such services become available.
This opens a market for the "man in the middle" that can help the companies to benefit from the Cloud offerings by looking at all aspects of aggregation, integration and customisation of services on behalf of the application end users. In many cases, this broker of Cloud services can also be entrusted the application execution phase, and therefore be able to continuously evolve and optimise the application on the user's behalf. Hence, the Cloud broker will fill the gap in the continuum from an application owner to the cloud infrastructure provider.
This talk discusses the different definitions of a Cloud broker and offers by existing Cloud providers claiming to support brokerage. This analysis provides the basis for the understanding of the mechanisms necessary for the broker in order to successfully provide Cloud brokerage. In addition, it shows that it is necessary that the methods and tools used by the broker cover the full service application life cycle, including more elementary mechanisms for Cloud service description, service governance, and service failure detection and recovery.
This reveals the close links of the broker's operation to two other essential aspects of distributed systems: adaptation and optimisation. An application needs to be able to adapt in response to service failures, but also as a consequence of the availability of new, equivalent and better services. Core to the efficient operation of the broker and its clients is their capability to increase their financial margins by always searching for better and cheaper services that can be integrated with the clients' applications. Thus, there is a need to continuously evolve and optimise the applications. This could, however, be a costly task offsetting the benefits of using the Cloud unless there are tools available to support this as an autonomous process.
The talk ends by presenting some recent European research efforts aiming at providing tools and platforms to brokers that supports quality assurance and optimisation of service compositions, and thereby indicate directions for future Cloud research.

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NordiCloud '13: Proceedings of the Second Nordic Symposium on Cloud Computing & Internet Technologies
September 2013
88 pages
ISBN:9781450323079
DOI:10.1145/2513534
Permission to make digital or hard copies of part or all of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for third-party components of this work must be honored. For all other uses, contact the Owner/Author.

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Association for Computing Machinery

New York, NY, United States

Publication History

Published: 02 September 2013

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  • Research-article

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NordiCloud '13

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NordiCloud '13 Paper Acceptance Rate 9 of 15 submissions, 60%;
Overall Acceptance Rate 9 of 15 submissions, 60%

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