On the role of ontologies in the design of service based cloud applications

The wide exploitation of cloud resources has been hindered by the diversity on the provision of these resources and thus resulting in heterogeneity between them. Research efforts on the design of cloud applications, leveraging resources form heterogeneous cloud environments, have been concentrated on traditional cloud platform resources such as deployment capabilities and data stores. However, the emergence of the cloud application platforms has made available a wide range of platform basic services (e.g. e-mail, message queue and authentication service) that can drastically decrease the application development time. Our work focuses on eliminating the heterogeneity among the providers offering those services. To this end we propose an ontology-driven framework, which facilitates the seamless and transparent use of platform basic services provisioned by multiple clouds environments. Ontologies are leveraged to enable the homogeneous description of the functionality of the service providers.