Supporting application development with structured queries in the cloud

To facilitate software development for multiple, federated cloud systems, abstraction layers have been introduced to mask the differences in the offerings, APIs, and terminology of various cloud providers. Such layers rely on a common ontology, which a) is difficult to create, and b) requires developers to understand both the common ontology and how various providers deviate from it. In this paper we propose and describe a structured query language for the cloud, Cloud SQL, along with a system and methodology for acquiring and organizing information from cloud providers and other entities in the cloud ecosystem such that it can be queried. It allows developers to run queries on data organized based on their semantic understanding of the cloud. Like the original SQL, we believe the use of a declarative query language will reduce development costs and make the multi-cloud accessible to a broader set of developers.