Emergence of Middleware to Mitigate the Challenges of Multi-Cloud Solutions onto Mobile Devices

Abstract

Cloud computing has invaded our lives so beautifully, that it is time to make cloud more productive. What makes Cloud computing novel is the possibility of an almost immediate resizing of resources on a pay-as-you-go usage model. With companies moving forward with various cloud initiatives, cloud consumers are discouraged from relinquishing their control of the infrastructure to the cloud providers. The rivalry among cloud providers to stay competitive in the market makes it necessary to lock-in its customers, and therefore customers cannot migrate easily to another due to non-interoperable APIs (Application Programming Interface), portability and migration issues. In addition, today’s cloud users are mobile devices and consuming a cloud service onto mobile device poses another set of risks. One way to handle this complexity is to devise an intermediary which can take care of the heterogeneity at the cloud and mobile level, and ensure a multi-cloud deployment of application by taking advantage of the best features from different vendors simultaneously. Thus, this paper is a sincere initiative to understand the problem beneath multi-cloud solutions and their embrace for the mobile world. Hence, the following paper begins with a broad coverage of existing work, gives an outline of a multi-cloud middleware, and discusses existing issues with API heterogeneity which is the prime point of concern in the vendor lock-in issue.