Semantics Centric Solutions for Application and Data Portability in Cloud Computing

Cloud computing has become one of the key considerations both in academia and industry. Cheap, seemingly unlimited computing resources that can be allocated almost instantaneously and pay-as-you-go pricing schemes are some of the reasons for the success of Cloud computing. The Cloud computing landscape, however, is plagued by many issues hindering adoption. One such issue is vendor lock-in, forcing the Cloud users to adhere to one service provider in terms of data and application logic. Semantic Web has been an important research area that has seen significant attention from both academic and industrial researchers. One key property of Semantic Web is the notion of interoperability and portability through high level models. Significant work has been done in the areas of data modeling, matching, and transformations. The issues the Cloud computing community is facing now with respect to portability of data and application logic are exactly the same issue the Semantic Web community has been trying to address for some time. In this paper we present an outline of the use of well established semantic technologies to overcome the vendor lock-in issues in Cloud computing. We present a semantics-centric programming paradigm to create portable Cloud applications and discuss MobiCloud, our early attempt to implement the proposed approach.