Experience in Practical Implementation of Abstraction Interface for Integrated Cloud Resource Management on Multi-Clouds

Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) clouds provide infrastructure as a pool of virtual resources, and the public IaaS clouds, e.g. Amazon Web Service (AWS) and private IaaS cloud toolkits, e.g. OpenStack, CloudStack, etc. provide their own application programming interfaces (APIs) for managing the cloud resources they offer. The heterogeneity of the APIs, however, makes it difficult to access and use the multiple cloud services concurrently and collectively. In this paper, we explore previous efforts to solve this problem and present our own implementation of an integrated cloud API, which can make it possible to access and use multiple clouds collectively in a uniform way. The implemented API provides a RESTful access and hides underlying cloud infrastructures from users or applications. We show the implementation details of the integrated API and performance evaluation of it comparing the proprietary APIs based on our cloud testbed. From the evaluation results, we could conclude that the overhead imposed by our interface is negligibly small and can be successfully used for multi-cloud access.