A Systematic Framework Enabling Automatic Conflict Detection and Explanation in Cloud Service Selection for Enterprises

The fast growth of cloud service offerings has attracted more enterprises to migrate their IT applications into cloud. Nonetheless, complex enterprise user requirements, especially interdependent relations across them, raise new challenges of cloud service selection. In addition, a major concern for these enterprises is ensuring compliance with their policies on the use of cloud services. In this paper, we present a systematic framework, based on formal verification and constraint solving techniques, to help enterprises tackle problems when adopting cloud computing. Our framework enables automatic detection of conflicts covering violation of enterprise policies and inconsistency of user requirements, and explanation generation which identifies problematic user requirements. The framework next select automatically cloud services which satisfy all enterprise policies and user requirements (with interdependent relations). We have prototyped and successfully applied our approach to projects which manage heterogeneous cloud infrastructure services for large enterprises.