A Precise Model for Google Cloud Platform

Today, Google Cloud Platform (GCP) is one of the leaders among cloud APIs. Although it was established only five years ago, GCP has gained notable expansion due to its suite of public cloud services that it based on a huge, solid infrastructure. GCP allows developers to use these services by accessing GCP RESTful API that is described through HTML pages on its website. However, the documentation of GCP API is written in natural language (English prose) and therefore shows several drawbacks, such as Informal Heterogeneous Documentation, Imprecise Types, Implicit Attribute Metadata, Hidden Links, Redundancy and Lack of Visual Support. To avoid confusion and misunderstandings, the cloud developers obviously need a precise specification of the knowledge and activities in GCP. Therefore, this paper introduces GCP Model, an inferred formal model-driven specification of GCP which describes without ambiguity the resources offered by GCP. GCP Model is conform to the Open Cloud Computing Interface (OCCI) metamodel and is implemented based on the open source model-driven Eclipse-based OCCIware tool chain. Thanks to our GCP Model, we offer corrections to the drawbacks we identified.