User-centric infrastructure as a service by Cloud Agency

• Published in: Multiagent and grid systems 2013-01, Vol.9 (2), p.157-179
• Main Author: Venticinque, Salvatore
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• ISSN: 1574-1702; 1875-9076
• DOI: 10.3233/MGS-130204

A new user centric Cloud perspective is needed in order to address a number of issues, which affect an effective exploitation of Cloud utilities by customers. It should support users for discovering Cloud services comparing different offers and choosing the one that best fits their requirements; it should allow them for using services without dealing with the heterogeneity of technologies and offers. Besides it should support users to evaluate and monitor services level agreements without trusting twice their providers. The proposed solution is a deployable platform, which can be used both as a standalone application and as an APIs. Cloud Agency is a multi agent system that has been designed in the context of the mOSAIC FP7 European project. It provides an OCCI compliant interface for the orchestration of agents, which execute on the user's desktop before the availability of the Cloud Infrastructure, and in the Cloud when the remote resources have been allocated. In this paper motivations, addressed issues and service models for the design and the development of such a system are introduced. We investigate the scalability of the Agency, in a way that is independent from the specific implementation of provided services, and demonstrate that the service interface is able to distribute the workload to the agents without introducing relevant overhead.