A New Paradigm of Cloud Brokerage

When the cloud computing industry started its commercial acceleration a few years back, a new player entered the computing supply chain - the cloud broker. With the transformation of core business models through hybrid cloud and multi-cloud environments being witnessed across industries today, next generation cloud brokerage is poised to disrupt cloud adoption. In this paper, we propose a cloud broker service framework that will shield consumers from the vagaries of multiple clouds. To achieve this insulation, cloud brokers will disguise themselves as end-providers by creating and operating a virtual data center construct that we call Meta Cloud, which is assembled on top of participating supplier clouds. The Meta Cloud will bring simplification and unified dependability by creating converged determinism on top of non-uniform and nondeterministic provider clouds. Hand in hand with Meta Clouds, is the concept of Meta Services that realize intelligent frameworks to enable creation of value-added multi-cloud services. Based on observations from other industries, Meta Cloud brokerage can trigger a dramatic upswing in multi-cloud adoption. This paper contributes to the technical intrinsic of this impending evolution. We identify the research questions that need to be answered to construct Meta Cloud brokerage. We design the architecture of the proposed Meta Cloud broker and model the Meta Cloud and Meta Service constructs to advance classical cloud brokerage to next-generation brokerage. We also build experimental results to demonstrate the validity of the our design.