A Rule-based Approach for Infrastructure Providers' Interoperability

Cloud Computing is a new computing paradigm where a large amount of computing capacity is offered on demand and only paying for what you use. Several Infrastructure Providers have adopted this approach offering resources which are easily managed by means of web-based APIs. However, if a user wants to use different providers, the resource management becomes tedious because providers define different API requiring a special implementation for interacting with each of them. In this paper, we present a methodology for making the provider interoperability easier. In this methodology, each provider's API is modeled by an ontology. Equivalences between these ontologies are modeled by rules, and messages used in a provider's API are converted in calls to another provider's API applying these rules. With our approach, users interact with Infrastructure Providers using their most familiar API and the translation to the other APIs is automatically done by the system.