Cloud service discovery and analysis: a unified framework

Abstract

Over the past few years, cloud computing has been more and more attractive as a new computing paradigm due to high flexibility for provisioning on-demand computing resources that are used as services through the Internet. The issues around cloud service discovery have considered by many researchers in the recent years. However, in cloud computing, with the highly dynamic, distributed, the lack of standardized description languages, diverse services offered at different levels and non-transparent nature of cloud services, this research area has gained a significant attention. Robust cloud service discovery approaches will assist the promotion and growth of cloud service customers and providers, but will also provide a meaningful contribution to the acceptance and development of cloud computing. In this dissertation, we have proposed an automated cloud service discovery approach of cloud services. We have also conducted extensive experiments to validate our proposed approach. The results demonstrate the applicability of our approach and its capability of effectively identifying and categorizing cloud services on the Internet. Firstly, we develop a novel approach to build cloud service ontology. Cloud service ontology initially is built based on the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) cloud computing standard. Then, we add new concepts to ontology by automatically analyzing real cloud services based on cloud service ontology Algorithm. We also propose cloud service categorization that use Term Frequency to weigh cloud service ontology concepts and calculate cosine similarity to measure the similarity between cloud services. The cloud service categorization algorithm is able to categorize cloud services to clusters for effective categorization of cloud services. In addition, we use Machine Learning techniques to identify cloud service in real environment. Our cloud service identifier is built by utilizing cloud service features extracted from the real cloud service providers. We determine several features such as similarity function, semantic ontology, cloud service description and cloud services components, to be used effectively in identifying cloud service on the Web. Also, we build a unified model to expose the cloud service’s features to a cloud service search user to ease the process of searching and comparison among a large amount of cloud services by building cloud service’s profile. Furthermore, we particularly develop a cloud service discovery Engine that has capability to crawl the Web automatically and collect cloud services. The collected datasets include meta-data of nearly 7,500 real-world cloud services providers and nearly 15,000 services (2.45GB). The experimental results show that our approach i) is able to effectively build automatic cloud service ontology, ii) is robust in identifying cloud service in real environment and iii) is more scalable in providing more details about cloud services.