In-the-Know: Recommendation Framework for City-Supported Hybrid Cloud Services

Hybrid cloud architectures are particularly attractive to leverage city-level investments for building customized clouds, and for extending them to leverage public clouds. A successful design of the hybrid cloud architecture should facilitate the provisioning of scalable and secure services suited to a variety of communities such as residential homes and high-tech business incubators. In this paper, we present a novel "In-the-know" recommendation framework for provisioning of cloud resources in the form of \´on-demand contracts\´ to address the challenges in delivering the hybrid service variations for different community and individual needs. Our recommendation framework uses knowledge of the city\´s socio-economic goals/values as well as user preferences in terms of cost, performance and mobility. Using such knowledge, it recommends dynamic decisions by choosing from various provisioning alternatives in order to: (a) ensure optimal user Quality of Experience (QoE) in service delivery, and (b) effective utilization of hybrid cloud resources. We validate our recommendation framework using service composition experiments to satisfy an exemplar collaboration use case in an actual city-supported hybrid cloud test bed involving citizen consumers.