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，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展示了其中的一些功能。研究人员现在正寻求解决一些关键的开放问题，并创建这个原型的更强大的版本或一个“云代理”工具，使用户能够从市场上过多的服务/提供商中选择最合适的服务(或服务的组合)。与许多现有工作不同，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级别协议(SLA)。这样的系统弥补了现有云技术中已发现的一个关键差距。研究团队计划使用语义Web(W3C标准)语言来构建原型。他们开发了描述云服务、需求、安全和隐私的本体和规则。此解决方案可能能够捕获和利用当前正在开发的联邦云标准。客户目前通过聘请顾问审查和比较服务和条件(条款、定价、合规性、安全性等)来手动获取云服务。由云提供商提供，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，降低了投资回报，并影响了安全和隐私。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，以消除云采用的这些障碍。

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.