An SLA Ontology to Support Service Discovery in Future Cloud Markets

Today a few providers dominate the market of cloud services. Very often, services advertised by different commercial providers are comparable in terms of offered features (both functional and non-functional) and price. We believe the lack of interoperability among cloud platforms is the main cause for this panorama of flattened cloud offers. Luckily, many initiatives are working at the definition of specifications that, once successfully adopted, will open up a new scenario of interoperable clouds. In that scenario, cloud providers will have to diversify their offerings in order to serve the widest possible range of customers´ request, customers, in their turn, will be able to choose, from a large assortment of services, those fitting their specific needs. In this work we address these issues by proposing a semantic discovery framework to support providers in creating and advertising their augmented offers, and to help customers making fine-tuned cloud service searches. Final objective is to implement an offer-demand matchmaking process capable of maximizing providers´ and customers´ utility. To enable mechanisms capable of reasoning on the actual requests´ needs and offers´ features, ontologies have been defined that describe the cloud context from a business point of view. In particular, guarantees offered by SLAs are the key business features put under the focus of this work. Preliminary tests on a software prototype show the effectiveness of the proposed approach.