A Generic Service Interface for Cloud Networks

Two major challenges for enabling the vision of cloud computing regard (a) the generic and multi-purpose access to (virtualised) resources, and (b) the flexible, dynamic, and on-demand composition of services vertically from the physical link level, all the way “up” to the application level. Both aspects require a respective flexibility and expressibility from the interfaces in-place, which is missing from the current static socket (and other) interfaces below the application level. In this position paper, we propose, explain and exemplify an alternative generic service interface (GSi) that borrows from object oriented design to enable properties such as polymorphic access, generic service composition, introspection and dynamic reconfigurability, of in-network resources; opening in this way the path for flexible creation of service clouds.