Underpinning a Cloud Brokerage Service Framework for Quality Assurance and Optimization

With the pervasion of cloud computing, enterprises increasingly rely on ecosystems of distributed, task-oriented, modular, and collaborative cloud services. In order to effectively manage the complexity inherent in such ecosystems, enterprises are anticipated to depend upon brokerage mechanisms for performing policy-based governance and for recommending optimal services to consumers. Such mechanisms crucially depend upon the existence of a uniform, platform-independent representation of services, consumer preferences, and policies concerning service delivery. In this paper we propose an ontology-based approach to such a representation.