Specifying Cloud Application Requirements: An Ontological Approach

Increasingly business organisations are deploying service applications onto cloud infrastructures. Given the available range of infrastructure providers and products, it is a challenging task to select the most appropriate set of cloud resources for a given application. Cloud providers offer resources in various formats using different pricing structures. There is a mismatch between the terminology used to specify an application’s requirements and that used to describe provider resources. In this paper, a resource allocation approach based on mapping application requirements onto cloud infrastructure products is proposed. Two domain-specific ontologies for media transcoding and financial services are used to illustrate how application requirements can be modelled. It is then shown how requirements can be mapped onto a general ontological description of cloud resources. The resource ontology is provider-agnostic and provides a framework for searching the cloud market for a set of products that meet an application’s requirements.