Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
Specifying Cloud Application Requirements:
An Ontological Approach
Yih Leong Sun, Terence Harmer, and Alan Stewart
Queen's University of Belfast,
University Road, Belfast, BT7 1NN, UK
{ysun05,t.harmer,a.stewart}@qub.ac.uk
Abstract.
Increasingly business organisations are deploying service ap-
plications onto cloud infrastructures. Given the available range of infras-
tructure providers and products, it is a challenging task to select the
most appropriate set of cloud resources for a given application. Cloud
providers offer resources in various formats using different pricing struc-
tures. There is a mismatch between the terminology used to specify an
application's requirements and that used to describe provider resources.
In this paper, a resource allocation approach based on mapping applica-
tion requirements onto cloud infrastructure products is proposed. Two
domain-specific ontologies for media transcoding and financial services
are used to illustrate how application requirements can be modelled. It is
then shown how requirements can be mapped onto a general ontological
description of cloud resources. The resource ontology is provider-agnostic
and provides a framework for searching the cloud market for a set of
products that meet an application's requirements.
Keywords:
cloud computing, cloud programming model, ontology.
1
Introduction
Manyorganisationsareutilisingcloudinfrastructuresasaflexibleandcost-effective
platform on which to execute business applications. Increasinglyprovidersoffer in-
frastructure resources or services in the cloud market for hosting cloud-based ap-
plications. Different providers offer different ways of leasing their cloud resources
usingdifferentpricingstructures.Inordertoachieveahighdegreeofbusinessconti-
nuity, it is importantthat cloud-basedapplications can operateeven under adverse
conditions. In the event of service interruptions caused by a provider's resources
malfunctioning, the organisation should have the option to migrate their applica-
tions elsewhere and avoid a vendor lock-in situation. From the application devel-
oper'spointofview,findinganappropriatesetofinfrastructureresourcesthatmeet
an application's requirements in a multi-provider cloud environment is a challeng-
ing task because of the range of products available as well as the dynamic nature
of the market.
Typically developers analyse an application's requirements and then select
a suitable set of infrastructure resources on which to execute the application.
