Semantic representation of cloud services: a case study for openstack

Abstract

Thanks to its high flexibility, cost-effectiveness and availability, Cloud Computing has quickly imposed itself on the IT scenery, rapidly flooding the market with new appealing services and offers. However, the current lack of a shared standard for the description of such services can represent an obstacle to the development of interoperable and portable Cloud solutions. The approach we investigate consists in the creation of a set of interrelated OWL ontologies, which describe both Cloud Services and APIs/methods used to invoke them, together with their relative parameters. Furthermore, OWL-S is exploited to describe the internal workflow of the described services. Our representation also offers means to describe Resources Configurations, which can be compared by means of SPARQL queries, enabling users to easily choose among the different offers proposed by competing vendors. In this paper we apply the proposed semantic based representation to the description of the Openstack offer, which represents an optimal case study to test and prove its effectiveness.