A Semantic Model for Utility Driven Discovery of Cloud Resources

Cloud computing has reached a high level of acceptance, both in academia and in industry. The maturity of the technology, along with the considerable business opportunity that has been promised, is the main responsible for its success. Nevertheless, today only few, very big players dominate the commercial panorama and take over market shares. From that position, they impose rigid pricing policies and quite inflexible negotiation schemes. When the ongoing cloud standardization process will complete, and thus full interoperability among clouds will be accomplished, new players will come into play. A real competition among cloud providers will then start based on key factors like the capability of providing flexible services tailored to specific, fine-grained customers´ requirements. In this market scenario a mechanism must be devised to support the matchmaking between what providers offer and what customers demand. In this work we define a semantic model to help customers and providers to characterize their demands/offers, and propose the use of semantic tools to perform the matchmaking in such a way to maximize both the provider´s and the customer´s satisfaction.