Agents layer to support cloud applications

Abstract

The process of developing, deploying and executing cloud applications is greatly influenced by the specifics of the cloud providers regarding the cloud infrastructure and the cloud resources. Important challenges are related to agreeing with the cloud vendors about the application resources and the quality of the services. Migrating the application from one cloud provider to another cloud provider or even using multiple providers at once is also difficult to achieve. The present paper proposes an architectural solution for the above mentioned problems by considering the agency paradigm and a special set of agents called Vendor Agents abstracting the cloud provider differences.