Cloud Interoperability via Message Bus and Monitoring Integration

In recent years, we have seen the rapid emergence of a plethora of Cloud providers with individual infrastructures, APIs and application description formats. This heterogeneity has resulted in vendor lock-in, which reduces consumer flexibility in terms of negotiation power, reaction to price increases and freedom to change provider. Achieving interoperability between Clouds is a means of addressing this issue. To realise this, the use of open standards has been suggested, but the existing standards are focused mainly on portability instead of interoperability. Besides, this heterogenous nature of Clouds makes inter-Cloud monitoring to facilitate interoperable Cloud management difficult. In this paper, we present a novel integrated approach to achieve interoperability between Clouds and to facilitate the management of service provisioning using multiple Clouds. The approach is based on the integration of a holistic message bus system with monitoring techniques. We present the design and implementation descriptions, and based on a use case scenario, we demonstrate a practical realisation of our approach.