Resource brokerage ontology for vendor-independent Cloud Service management

Cloud software deployment, resource provisioning, monitoring and full cycle maintenance has proven to be time-consuming and complicated. While one cloud provider is good at one or a few services, other providers might be good at other services. Cloud users eventually want to consume most advantageous resources across multiple providers with the best price while avoiding vendor lock-in. Cloud users also need to safeguard their most valuable digital asset, their data, against cloud outage, which can happen to any vendor. This could mean using the same type of resources across multiple cloud providers. Moreover, cloud providers are continuously changing and evolving their services. Cloud users can only take advantage of these changes if they are able to relocate and real-locate resources using an autonomous and vendor independent tool. We propose a vendor-independent cloud provisioning tool that utilizes an ontology-based semantic reasoning to acquire the best feasible cloud resources for cloud users. In this paper, we outline an ontology subset for purchasing cloud resources or services based on price, user transaction volume, preference, quality of service and Service Layer Agreements (SLA). The proposed ontology is outlined in a case scenario followed by an applied algorithm for negotiating resource purchase between cloud consumer client and cloud vendor provisioning services. Such ontology can be used in inter-cloud federation API for monitoring and acquiring and maintaining the most advantageous cloud resources.