Towards a REST Cloud Computing Lexicon

Cloud computing is a popular Internet-based computing paradigm that provides on-demand computational services and resources, generally offered by cloud providers’ REpresentational State Transfer (REST) APIs. To the best of our knowledge, there has been no study on the analysis of the lexicon adopted by cloud providers, despite its importance for developers. In this paper, we studied three different and well-known REST APIs (Google Cloud Platform, OpenStack, and Open Cloud Computing Interface) to investigate and organise their lexicons. This study presents three main contributions: 1) a tooled approach, called CLOUDLEX, for extracting and analysing REST cloud computing lexicons, 2) a dataset of services, resources, and terms used in the three studied REST APIs, 3) our analysis of this dataset, which represents a first attempt to provide a common REST cloud computing lexicon. After analysing our dataset, we observe that although the three studied REST APIs to describe the same domain (cloud computing), contrary to what one might expect, they do not share a large number of common terms, and only 5% of terms (17/352) are shared by two providers. Thus, the three APIs are lexically heterogeneous, and there is not a consensus on which terms to use on cloud computing systems. We discuss new avenues for cloud computing API designers and researchers.