Virtual Cloud Bank: Cloud Service Broker for Intermediating Services Based on Semantic Analysis Models

With the expansion of the cloud computing paradigm, various cloud services are emerging. As a consequence, the utilization of cloud services has increased. However, the complexity of cloud service usage is also increasing, because the cloud providers have different performance levels and prices for cloud services that offer similar functions. Therefore, there is a need for a Cloud Service Brokerage (CSB). CSBs act as intermediaries to the cloud services to fulfill the requirements of the tenants. In this paper, we present a CSB called a Virtual Cloud Bank (VCB). This includes a Tenant Analysis Model, which is used to collect and analyze the tenant requirements, a Service Analysis Model, which is used for the specification and analysis of various cloud services, and a Cloud-service Query and Inference Model, which is used for querying and inference of the cloud services. Our VCB can be utilized as a reference architecture for providing tenant-centric cloud services.