A Web Service for Cloud Metadata

Descriptive information about available cloud services (i.e., metadata) is required in order to make good decisions about which cloud service provider(s) to utilize when deploying an application topology to the cloud. Presently, there are no uniform mechanisms for describing these services. Further, there is no unifying process that aggregates this metadata from the set of cloud providers and makes it available to a user in a programmatic fashion from a single location. This paper presents a methodology for and an implementation of a service-oriented application that provides relevant metadata information describing offered cloud services via a uniform RESTful web service. The data provided by this service is automatically acquired and mapped to a standard ontology. Community members can submit performance benchmarks using a metrics agent that submits metrics via a web service. Several example applications using this API to help users select resources are presented.