Brokering in interconnected cloud computing environments: A survey

Abstract

Cloud computing provides computing platforms and facilitates to optimize utilization of infrastructure resources, reduces deployment time and increases flexibility. The popularity of cloud computing led to development of interconnected cloud computing environments (ICCE) such as hybrid cloud, inter-cloud, multi-cloud, and federated cloud, enabling the possibilities to share resources among individual clouds. However, individual proprietary technologies and access interfaces employed by cloud service providers made it difficult to share resources. Interoperability and portability are two of the major challenges to be addressed to ensure seamless access and sharing of resources and services.Many cloud service providers have similar service offerings but different access patterns. It is difficult and time consuming for a cloud user to select an appropriate cloud service as per the application’s requirement. Cloud user has to gather information from various cloud service providers and analyze them. Cloud broker has been proposed to address the challenge of cloud users to get best out of cloud provider. Cloud broker is an entity which works as an independent third party between cloud users and cloud providers. Cloud broker negotiates with several cloud providers as per user’s requirements and tries to select the best services. Cloud broker coordinates the sharing of resources and provides interoperability and portability with other cloud providers.In this paper, a comprehensive survey of cloud brokering in interconnected cloud computing environments has been provided. The need and importance of cloud broker has been discussed. The existing architectures and frameworks of Cloud Brokering are reviewed. A comprehensive literature survey of various Cloud Brokering techniques is presented. A taxonomy of Cloud Brokering techniques has been presented and analyzed on the basis of their strengths and weaknesses/limitations. The taxonomy includes pricing, multi-criteria, quality of services, optimization and trust techniques. The techniques are analyzed on various performance metrics. Research challenges and open problems are identified from reviewed techniques. A model for cloud broker is proposed to address identified challenges. We hope that our work will enable researchers to launch and dive deep into Cloud Brokering challenges in interconnected cloud computing environments.