Designing Business Models for Platform as a Service: Towards a Design Theory

Platform as a Service (PaaS) solutions are changing the way that software is produced, distributed, consumed, and priced. Unlike Software as a Service or Infrastructure as a Service, PaaS allows for value co-creation by offering complementary components and applications that are developed in emerging ecosystems of third-party developers. Despite increasing interest among practitioners and researchers, there has been little work in understanding how PaaS business models should be designed to establish a flourishing ecosystem. We aim at developing a design theory that facilitates the design of PaaS business models, taking into account the specifics of multisided business models. Four meta-requirements describe the purpose and scope of our design theory, and six design principles guide PaaS providers in designing effective business models. By focusing on designing business models, our research goes beyond previous approaches for studying PaaS

A Review on Modern Distributed Computing Paradigms: Cloud Computing, Jungle Computing and Fog Computing

The distributed computing attempts to improve performance in large-scale computing problems by resource sharing. Moreover, rising low-cost computing power coupled with advances in communications/networking and the advent of big data, now enables new distributed computing paradigms such as Cloud, Jungle and Fog computing.Cloud computing brings a number of advantages to consumers in terms of accessibility and elasticity. It is based on centralization of resources that possess huge processing power and storage capacities. Fog computing, in contrast, is pushing the frontier of computing away from centralized nodes to the edge of a network, to enable computing at the source of the data. On the other hand, Jungle computing includes a simultaneous combination of clusters, grids, clouds, and so on, in order to gain maximum potential computing power.To understand these new buzzwords, reviewing these paradigms together can be useful. Therefore, this paper describes the advent of new forms of distributed computing. It provides a definition for Cloud, Jungle and Fog computing, and the key characteristics of them are determined. In addition, their architectures are illustrated and, finally, several main use cases are introduced

Cloud resource orchestration in the multi-cloud landscape: a systematic review of existing frameworks

The number of both service providers operating in the cloud market and customers consuming cloud-based services is constantly increasing, proving that the cloud computing paradigm has successfully delivered its potential. Nevertheless, the unceasing growth of the cloud market is posing hard challenges on its participants. On the provider side, the capability of orchestrating resources in order to maximise profits without failing customers’ expectations is a matter of concern. On the customer side, the efficient resource selection from a plethora of similar services advertised by a multitude of providers is an open question. In such a multi-cloud landscape, several research initiatives advocate the employment of software frameworks (namely, cloud resource orchestration frameworks - CROFs) capable of orchestrating the heterogeneous resources offered by a multitude of cloud providers in a way that best suits the customer’s need. The objective of this paper is to provide the reader with a systematic review and comparison of the most relevant CROFs found in the literature, as well as to highlight the multi-cloud computing open issues that need to be addressed by the research community in the near future

Leveraging cloud computing for the semantic web: review and trends

Semantic and cloud computing technologies have become vital elements for developing and deploying solutions across diverse fields in computing. While they are independent of each other, they can be integrated in diverse ways for developing solutions and this has been significantly explored in recent times. With the migration of web-based data and applications to cloud platforms and the evolution of the web itself from a social, web 2.0 to a semantic, web 3.0 comes as the convergence of both technologies. While several concepts and implementations have been provided regarding interactions between the two technologies from existing research, without an explicit classification of the modes of interaction, it can be quite challenging to articulate the interaction modes; hence, building upon them can be a very daunting task. Hence, this research identifies and describes the modes of interaction between them. Furthermore, a “cloud-driven” interaction mode which focuses on fully maximising cloud computing characteristics and benefits for driving the semantic web is described, providing an approach for evolving the semantic web and delivering automated semantic annotation on a large scale to web applications

Optimal Selection Techniques for Cloud Service Providers

Nowadays Cloud computing permeates almost every domain in Information and Communications Technology (ICT) and, increasingly, most of the action is shifting from large, dominant players toward independent, heterogeneous, private/hybrid deployments, in line with an ever wider range of business models and stakeholders. The rapid growth in the numbers and diversity of small and medium Cloud providers is bringing new challenges in the as-a-Services space. Indeed, significant hurdles for smaller Cloud service providers in being competitive with the incumbent market leaders induce some innovative players to "federate" deployments in order to pool a larger, virtually limitless, set of resources across the federation, and stand to gain in terms of economies of scale and resource usage efficiency. Several are the challenges that need to be addressed in building and managing a federated environment, that may go under the "Security", "Interoperability", "Versatility", "Automatic Selection" and "Scalability" labels. The aim of this paper is to present a survey about the approaches and challenges belonging to the "Automatic Selection" category. This work provides a literature review of different approaches adopted in the "Automatic and Optimal Cloud Service Provider Selection", also covering "Federated and Multi-Cloud" environments

Using Semantic Web Technologies to Query and Manage Information within Federated Cyber-Infrastructures

A standardized descriptive ontology supports efficient querying and manipulation of data from heterogeneous sources across boundaries of distributed infrastructures, particularly in federated environments. In this article, we present the Open-Multinet (OMN) set of ontologies, which were designed specifically for this purpose as well as to support management of life-cycles of infrastructure resources. We present their initial application in Future Internet testbeds, their use for representing and requesting available resources, and our experimental performance evaluation of the ontologies in terms of querying and translation times. Our results highlight the value and applicability of Semantic Web technologies in managing resources of federated cyber-infrastructures.EC/FP7/318389/EU/Federation for FIRE/Fed4FIREEC/FP7/732638/EU/Federation for FIRE Plus/Fed4FIREplu