I-Corps: Exploring Commercial Feasibility of Semantically Rich Cloud Service Broker solution

研究人员开发了一个软件框架，可以帮助自动定义、获取和使用基于云的服务。在最近的一次云计算会议上，一个简单的原型成功地展示了其中的一些特性。研究人员现在正在寻找解决一些关键的开放问题，并创建一个更强大的原型版本或“云代理”工具，使用户能够从市场上大量的服务/提供商中选择最适合的服务（或服务组合）。与大多数现有工作不同，这将涉及服务提供者和使用者之间的（自动）协商，以达成机器可理解和可处理的服务水平协议（SLA）。这样的系统解决了现有云技术中一个关键的空白。研究小组计划使用语义网（W3C标准）语言来构建原型。他们开发了本体和规则来描述云服务、需求、安全和隐私。此解决方案可能具有捕获和利用当前正在开发中的联邦云标准的能力。客户目前通过雇用顾问来手动获取云服务，以审查和比较云提供商提供的服务和条件（条款、定价、遵从性、安全性等），建立sla，然后在使用期间监控sla。这是一个非常耗时和人力密集的过程，这会降低投资回报，并影响安全性和隐私。因此，拥有复杂企业策略的大型组织无法充分利用云的潜力。市场需要一种经过充分研究和测试的解决方案来解决云采用的这些障碍。

Researchers have developed a software framework that helps to automatically define, acquire and consume cloud based services. A simple prototype demonstrating some of these features was successfully demonstrated at a recent cloud computing conference. Researchers are now looking to address some key open questions and create a more robust version of this prototype or a "cloud broker" tool that will enable users to select the best suited service (or a combination of services) from the plethora of services/providers in the market. Unlike much of the existing work, this will involve (automated) negotiation between the service provider and the consumer to arrive at a machine understandable and processable service-level agreement (SLA). Such a system addresses a key identified gap in existing cloud technology. The research team plans to use Semantically Web (W3C standard) languages to build the prototype. They have developed ontologies and rules to describe cloud services, requirements, security and privacy. This solution may have the ability to capture and leverage federal cloud standards currently in development.Customers are currently acquiring cloud services manually by hiring consultants to review and compare the services and conditions (terms, pricing, compliance, security etc.) being offered by the cloud providers, establish SLAs, and then monitor SLAs during usage. This is a very time consuming and human intensive process which reduces return on investments and impacts security and privacy. As a result, large organizations with complex enterprise policies are unable to use full potential of the cloud. There is a market need for a well-researched, tested solution that addresses these barriers to cloud adoption.