Evaluating Open IaaS Cloud Platforms Based upon NIST Cloud Computing Reference Model

Free and open in nature, open cloud platforms have enjoyed their wide acceptance in academic institutions and enterprises. Fair and insightful comparisons of these available open cloud platforms, however, can still be a challenging task, mainly due to lack of an appropriate evaluation methodology. In this paper, we thus attempt to perform a quantitative evaluation on open IaaS platforms, and such a method of evaluation is based on the standpoint and the perspective of the end software consumers. In essence, based on ISO/IEC 25010:2011 and NIST Cloud Computing Reference Model, we develop a number of rules to score the key features of the open cloud platforms. As an example to showcase this method, the quantitative results and the scores of a few well-known IaaS platforms are reported.