Author_Institution :
Cloud Lab., Univ. of California, Merced, Merced, CA, USA
Abstract :
The emerging field of Cloud Computing provides several advantages over traditional in-house IT services, such as accessing to elastic on-demand computing and storage over the Internet, and cost effective pay-per-use subscription plans. However, according to the International Data Corporation (IDC), cloud computing has several issues, such as a lack of standardization, a lack of customization, and limited interoperability. In addition, there is an increasing demand for introduction and migration of a variety of services to cloud computing systems, which are abstract their offering services into various *-as-a-Services (*aaS) layers. Although each such service provides a new feature (e.g., simulation services in cloud), it aggravates the issues due to the lack of standardization and inability to customize services by a vendor because each *aaS has its own features, requirements and output. In this paper, we propose a cloud architecture to alleviate issues associated with standardization and customization. In the cloud, the proposed architecture uses a single layer, called Template-as-a-Service (TaaS), to provide: (i) a single service layer for interaction with all resources and major cloud services (e.g., IaaS, PaaS, SaaS and *aaS), (ii) a standardization for existing services and future *aaS across different cloud environments, and (iii) a customizable architecture which can be modified on demand by a cloud vendor, and its partners to provide the flexibility on cloud computing systems. A comparison with previous studies show that the proposed architecture provides customization and standardization for cloud services with minimum modifications.