Toward dynamic and attribute based publication, discovery and selection for cloud computing

Cloud computing is an emerging paradigm where computing resources are offered over the Internet as scalable, on-demand (Web) services. While cloud vendors have concentrated their efforts on the improvement of performance, resource consumption and scalability, other cloud characteristics have been neglected. On the one hand cloud service providers face difficult problems of publishing services that expose resources, and on the other hand cloud clients do not have the means for discovery and automatic services' selection, and easy use of services. In response, proposed in this article is the application of the Resources Via Web Services framework (RVWS) to offer higher level abstraction of clouds in the form of a new technology. Our new technology makes possible the provision of service (and resource) publication, discovery and selection based on dynamic attributes which express the current state and characteristics of cloud services and resources. A proof of concept implementation that allowed the easy publication, discovery, selection and use of an existing cluster (one of the most frequently used cloud resource) via a simple interface using Web pages backed by extensive sets of tests has demonstrated that the design is sound and the proposed technology is feasible. The proposed solution is significant: instead of spending time and effort locating, evaluating and learning about clusters, clients are able to easily discover, select and use the required resources. Furthermore, service providers (which can be entities external to clouds themselves) can easily publish (and keep current) information about their services (and the resources behind them). (C) 2010 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.