A Reference Architecture for Cloud Service Offers

Cloud computing is a concept for the provisioning of internet-based information technology services as a common supply, similar to water supply, electric power supply, and telecommunication services. Several conceptual frameworks to describe and characterize Cloud service offers exist. As they are developed by different groups and organizations, they differ in their intention, type of formulation, the level of description, and in terms of which key issues of cloud service evaluation are addressed. To help overcoming the prevalent skepticism of enterprises regarding Cloud service offers, we surveyed different frameworks for Cloud service offer description. Based on this survey, we propose a consolidated reference architecture to uniformly describe and evaluate Cloud service offers, regardless of whether an organization´s own offers or the offers of external providers are evaluated. In addition, we present Cloud Service Navigators (CSN) as a suitable visualization technique to describe visually and compare Cloud service offers and requests.