With the pervasion of cloud computing the enterprise IT environment is progressively transformed into an ecosystem of highly distributed, task-oriented, modular, and collaborative cloud services. In order to deal effectively with the complexity inherent in such ecosystems, future enterprises are anticipated to increasingly rely on cloud service brokerage (CSB). This paper presents a CSB mechanism which offers capabilities with respect to the Quality Assurance dimension of CSB. The proposed mechanism evaluates the compliance of cloud services with pre-specified policies concerning the technical, and mainly the business aspects, of service deployment and delivery. By relying on a declarative representation of both services and policies, the proposed mechanism is kept generic and orthogonal to any underlying cloud delivery platform.
['Simeon Veloudis', 'Iraklis Paraskakis', 'Christos Petsos']
A generic mechanism for cloud service governance and quality control