Cloud Abstraction Libraries: Implementation and Comparison

Vendor lock-in makes it difficult for an organization to port their services, application or data. Cloud providers are in race to provide the best-in-class storage, networking and compute resources. Many organizations are moving towards micro-services and cloud services architecture. It is very important for an infrastructure platform to offer a high-quality cloud computing environment consistently across multiple cloud platforms. To enable this, a collaborative yet an independent cloud abstraction service is required. The cloud abstraction library should support the basic use cases of delivery pipeline, service management, cloud operations and security service. Cloud interoperability standards helps to improve availability and scalability by providing cross organizational or vendor independent projects. An important aspect of cloud interoperability is development of standardized APIs to send and receive data, irrespective of the underlying cloud implementation. Cloud interoperability helps application and data portability between public clouds and private clouds. This thesis explores the role of open source libraries to use cloud specific features. Our work is to qualitatively and quantitatively evaluate Dasein cloud and jClouds against Amazon EC2 and Google Compute Engine. We believe that cloud standardization can be accelerated by implementations based on open source and open standards

From security to assurance in the cloud: a survey

The cloud computing paradigm has become a mainstream solution for the deployment of business processes and applications. In the public cloud vision, infrastructure, platform, and software services are provisioned to tenants (i.e., customers and service providers) on a pay-as-you-go basis. Cloud tenants can use cloud resources at lower prices, and higher performance and flexibility, than traditional on-premises resources, without having to care about infrastructure management. Still, cloud tenants remain concerned with the cloud's level of service and the nonfunctional properties their applications can count on. In the last few years, the research community has been focusing on the nonfunctional aspects of the cloud paradigm, among which cloud security stands out. Several approaches to security have been described and summarized in general surveys on cloud security techniques. The survey in this article focuses on the interface between cloud security and cloud security assurance. First, we provide an overview of the state of the art on cloud security. Then, we introduce the notion of cloud security assurance and analyze its growing impact on cloud security approaches. Finally, we present some recommendations for the development of next-generation cloud security and assurance solutions