Samer Hasan, January 2019 Awarded
Cloud computing is a paradigm for delivering ubiquitous and on demand resources based on pay as you use financial model. It turns the IT services into utility like: water, electricity, gas and telephony. Cloud service discovery and selection becomes a significant challenge because of exponential growth in the number of cloud service providers. Typically, Cloud service providers publish cloud service advertisements and Service Level Agreement (SLA) details in various formats on the Internet. Consumers should explore cloud service provider websites using the existing search engines like (Google and Yahoo) to collect information about all available services and select the best one manually. Unfortunately general purpose search engines are not designed to provide a complete and small set of results that meet the consumer requirements which makes the discovery and selection process a tedious task.
This thesis presents a generic-distrusted framework for cloud services marketplace to: i) automate cloud service discovery and selection process, ii) reduce the time and effort of finding cloud services, iii) make service providers more visible to all consumers, iv) create a shared understanding of cloud service domain and v) improve the overall user experience. In addition, this thesis presents a novel algorithm for cloud services numerical similarity named Percent Distance Similarity (PDS) which is independent of any external values. To overcome the interoperability and vendor lock-in problems, this thesis presents unified cloud services ontology and models the real-life services according to proposed ontology. Finally, this thesis implements two instances of generic framework by adopting two different matching algorithms. First one is based on dominant and recessive attributes algorithm borrowed from gene science and the second one is based on a semantic similarity algorithm and unified cloud service ontology.This thesis is the first attempt to build a cloud service marketplace where cloud service providers and cloud service consumers can trade a cloud service as a utility. It is a global digital market where cloud consumer can find the solution that match his/her needs by simply submitting a request. Comparison done with existing systems on real-life cloud services collected from providers websites based on four parameters (number of matched services, execution time, average Score and recall). Semantic approach based on cloud ontology reduced the execution time by 20% and maintain the same values for all other parameters. On the other hand, Non-semantic approach reduced the execution time by 57% but showed lower value for recall.