engleski

Platform as a Service API Ontology

Many organizations from the public and the private sector are planning to turn to Cloud Computing services, whose main benefits are flexibility, pay-per-use model and significant cost reduction. However, this new business paradigm for the provision of computing infrastructure has certain obstacles, including provider lock-in. When a client chooses a specific Cloud service provider, he also gets the provider’s specific protocols, standards and tools, making a potential future migration complex and costly. Cloud Computing is still immature, with no firmly established standards governing all the aspects of its utilization. The migration issue can be overcome by using interoperable Cloud services. In this paper we focus on the platform as a service (PaaS) model of Cloud Computing. This model provides a complete computing platform needed to run applications over the Internet. Every PaaS provider (such as Google, Microsoft, Amazon and Salesforce) has specified its custom application programming interfaces (APIs). However, to achieve interoperability we need to develop a standardized set of APIs that constitute an interoperability platform. In this paper, we firstly present the key concepts and relevant related work from the existing literature. Thereafter we propose a novel PaaS API ontology to share a common understanding of the main concepts from providers’ APIs. We used a prominent ontology development methodology to determine the domain and scope of our ontology, review similar existing ontologies, define the relevant classes and their hierarchy as well as to define the properties of classes and create their instances. The concepts in our ontology were derived from PaaS resources, remote Cloud functions specified in the API documentation of the most important PaaS solutions, existing Cloud ontologies, Cloud Computing models and standards for Semantic Web services. The aim of the proposed ontology is the description of PaaS resources and their operations. It was built using the Web Ontology Language (OWL) and the Protege tool. In the future, we plan to use this ontology to semantically annotate PaaS API operations and create a mechanism to determine and solve interoperability problems among two or more PaaS services provided by different vendors.

platform as a service; interoperability; ontology; Cloud Computing

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