Flexible Coordination Techniques for Dynamic Cloud Service Collaboration

Abstract

The provision of individual, but also composed services is central in cloud service provisioning. The authors describe a framework for the coordination of cloud services, based on a tuple-space architecture which uses an ontology to describe the services. Current techniques for service collaboration offer limited scope for flexibility. They are based on statically describing and compositing services. With the open nature of the web and cloud services, the need for a more flexible, dynamic approach to service coordination becomes evident. In order to support open communities of service providers, there should be the option for these providers to offer and withdraw their services to/from the community. For this to be realised, there needs to be a degree of self-organisation. The authors’ techniques for coordination and service matching aim to achieve this through matching goal-oriented service requests with providers that advertise their offerings dynamically. Scalability of the solution is a particular concern that will be evaluated in detail.