A trust computing mechanism for cloud computing

Cloud computing has been considered as the 5th utility as computing resources including computing power, storage, development platform and applications will be available as services and consumers will pay only for what consumed. This is in contrast to the current practice of outright purchase or leasing of computing resources. When the cloud computing becomes popular, there will be multiple vendor offering different services at different Quality of Services and at different prices. The customers will need a scheme to select the right service provider based on their requirements. A trust management system will match the service providers and the customers based on the requirements and offerings. In this paper, the authors propose a trust formulation and evolution mechanism that can be used to measure the performance of cloud systems. The proposed mechanism formulates trust scores for different service level requirements, hence is suitable for managing multiple service levels against single trust score. Also the proposed mechanism is an adaptive one that takes the dynamics of performance variation along with cloud attributes such as number of virtual servers into computations. Finally the proposed mechanism has been tested under a simulated environment and the results have been presented.