Resource Cloud Mashups

LUTZ SCHUBERT, MATTHIAS ASSEL, ALEXANDER KIPP, and STEFANWESNER21.1 INTRODUCTIONOutsourcing computation and/or storage away from the local infrastructure isnot a new concept itself: Already the grid and Web service domain presented(and uses) concepts that allow integration of remote resource for seeminglylocal usage. Nonetheless, the introduction of the cloud concept via suchproviders as Amazon proved to be a much bigger success than, for example,Platform’s Grid Support [1]—or at least a much more visible success. However,the configuration and management overhead of grids greatly exceeds one of thewell-known cloud providers and therefore encourages, in particular, averageusers to use the system. Furthermore, clouds address an essential economicalfactor, namely, elastic scaling according to need, thereby theoretically reducingunnecessary resource loads.Cloud systems are thereby by no means introducing a new technology—justthe opposite in fact, because many of the initial cloud providers simply openedtheir existing infrastructure to the customers and thus exploited their respectiveproprietary solutions. Implicitly, the offered services and hence the accordingAPI are specific to the service provider and can not be used in other environ-ments. This, however, poses major issues for customers, as well as for futureproviders.Interoperability and Vendor Lock-In. Since most cloud offerings are pro-prietary, customers adopting the according services or adapting their respectiveapplications to these environments are implicitly bound to the respective