Towards Model-Driven Provisioning, Deployment, Monitoring, and Adaptation of Multi-cloud Systems

In the landscape of cloud computing, the competition between providers has led to an ever growing number of cloud solutions offered to consumers. The ability to run and manage multi-cloud systems (i.e., applications on multiple clouds) allows exploiting the peculiarities of each cloud solution and hence optimising the performance, availability, and cost of the applications. However, these cloud solutions are typically heterogeneous and the provided features are often incompatible. This diversity hinders the proper exploitation of the full potential of cloud computing, since it prevents interoperability and promotes vendor lock-in, as well as it increases the complexity of development and administration of multi-cloud systems. This problem needs to be addressed promptly. In this paper, we provide a classification of the state-of-the-art of cloud solutions, and argue for the need for model-driven engineering techniques and methods facilitating the specification of provisioning, deployment, monitoring, and adaptation concerns of multi-cloud systems at design-time and their enactment at run-time.