Toward Governance of Cross-Cloud Application Deployment

Abstract: In this article, the authors introduce the main ideas around the governance of cross-Cloud application deployment and their related concepts. It is argued that, due to the increasing complexity and nature of the Cloud market, an intermediary specialized in brokering the deployment of different components of a same application onto different Cloud products could both facilitate said deployment and in some cases improve its quality in terms of cost, security & reliability and QoS. In order to fulfill these objectives, the authors propose a high level architecture that relies on their previous work on governance of policy & rule driven distributed systems. This architecture aims at supplying five main functions of 1) translation of Service Level Agreements (SLAs) and pricing into a common shared DSL, 2) correlation of analytical data (e.g. monitoring, metering), 3) combination of Cloud products, 4) information from third parties regarding different aspects of Quality of Service (QoS) and 5) cross-Cloud application deployment specification and governance.