Semantic Representation of Cloud Patterns and Services with Automated Reasoning to Support Cloud Application Portability

During the past years the Cloud Computing offer has exponentially grown, with new Cloud providers, platforms and services being introduced in the IT market. The extreme variety of services, often providing non uniform and incompatible interfaces, makes it hard for customers to decide how to develop, or even worse to migrate, their own application into the Cloud. This situation can only get worse when customers want to exploit services from different providers, because of the portability and interoperability issues that often arise. In this paper we propose a uniform, integrated, machine-readable, semantic representation of cloud services, patterns, appliances and their compositions. Our approach aims at supporting the development of new applications for the Cloud environment, using semantic models and automatic reasoning to enhance potability and interoperability when multiple platforms are involved. In particular, the proposed reasoning procedure allows to: perform automatic discovery of Cloud services and Appliances; map between agnostic and vendor dependent Cloud Patterns and Services; automatically enrich the semantic knowledge base.