Broker@Cloud

As enterprises increasingly adopt the model of cloud computing, the enterprise IT environment is progressively transformed into a matrix of interwoven infrastructure, platform and application services which are delivered from diverse service providers. To help enterprises deal with the overwhelming complexity of consuming large numbers of cloud services from diverse providers, future enterprise cloud service delivery platforms will need to implement a wide array of sophisticated brokerage-enabling capabilities, which will give rise to services that go far beyond anything currently offered by today’s cloud intermediaries. The challenge, to which the Broker@Cloud project commits, is to research and to develop solutions with respect to some of the most valuable and technically demanding types of brokerage capabilities foreseen for future enterprise cloud service brokers.

In particular, we envisage the development of a brokerage framework which will allow cloud intermediaries to equip their platforms with advanced methods and mechanisms for continuous quality assurance and optimization of software-based enterprise cloud services. Those software-based services can range from simple programmatically accessible web APIs, to complex software applications delivered as cloud services, i.e. on-demand Software-as-a-Service offerings. The brokerage framework, for which most of the software components will be released as Open Source Software, will comprise the following core building blocks:

• methods and tools for platform-neutral description of enterprise cloud services;
• methods and mechanisms for cloud service governance and quality control;
• methods and mechanisms for cloud service failure prevention and recovery;
• methods and mechanisms for continuous optimization of cloud services.

For more information visit http://www.broker-cloud.eu/