Service-Level Interoperability Issues of Platform as a Service

Abstract

The numerous heterogeneities among different providers make platform as a service interoperability an interesting and complex research and practical problem. For example, each provider offers its own remote application programming interfaces (APIs). The main aim of this paper is to identify and address service-level interoperability issues when using APIs from different commercial providers of platform as a service. First, we define use case to add current user information from one platform as a service offer to the application hosted on another offer. To address interoperability problems, the ontology driven data mediation will be used and tested in this use case. Remote vendors' APIs are implemented as web services. Resulting web operations and their inputs/outputs are semantically annotated using cross-PaaS concepts from the developed platform as a service OWL ontology. Next, SAWSDL and XSLT are used to define service type mappings. Actual composition of platform as a service APIs is implemented by means of AI planner and developed Java web application. Testing and validation was performed on a case where current Salesforce's user is added to data container in Vosao content management system deployed on Google App Engine. Novelty of the paper is a specific application domain (composition of operations defined in PaaS APIs) and new algorithm for identification of interoperability problems.

A survey on the service interoperability in cloud computing: Client‐centric and provider‐centric perspectives

“…Semantic technologies facilitate the exchange and interpretation of data between services. Thus, they were widely used to achieve multicloud interoperability …”

“…Androcec et al addressed service level interoperability problems. They developed an ontology using Protégé and OWL to semantically annotate the APIs operations of the PaaS offers.…”

“…Many research and academic studies addressed the service interoperability and the vendor lock‐in problem in both single and interconnected clouds environments. The researchers proposed solutions such as standardization, brokering, model‐driven approaches, and semantic‐based solutions . There are five major cloud actors that were described in the cloud computing reference architecture: cloud consumer, cloud provider, cloud broker, cloud auditor, and cloud carrier.…”

“…Although, cloud provider is a person or an organization that offers services and makes them available to the interested parties . Therefore, the approaches are classified in two categories: (i) client‐centric approaches; and (ii) provider‐centric approaches . The first category targets cloud clients to overcome the vendor lock‐in and to give clients the freedom to migrate/move their data across providers or clouds and to control their deployed applications .…”

Component-wise Application Migration in Bidimensional Cross-cloud Environments

“…The last step in this direction is the possibility of deploying applications combining services from IaaS and PaaS levels, possibly by different vendors in trans-cloud environments [Carrasco et al, 2016]. The selection of the vendor or service level to deploy an application from among the multitude of cloud offerings is indeed a challenge (see, e.g., [Androcec et al, 2015, Moustafa et al, 2016, Brogi et al, 2014). The decision is indeed non-trivial, and the context and required knowledge may change while applications are running.…”