Aggregated Capability Assessment (AgCA) for CAIQ enabled Cross-cloud Federation

Abstract

Cross-Cloud Federation (CCF) enables resource exchange among multiple, heterogeneous Cloud Service Providers (CSPs) to support the composition of services (workflow) hosted by different providers. CCF participation can either be fixed, or the types of services that can be used are limited to reduce potential risk of service failure or secure access. Although many service selection approaches have been proposed in literature for cloud computing, their applicability to CCF (i.e. cloud-to-cloud interaction) has not been adequately investigated. A key component of this cloud-to-cloud paradigm involves assessing the combined capability of contributing participants within a federation and their connectivity. A novel Aggregated Capability Assessment (AgCA) approach based on using the Consensus Assessment Initiative Questionnaire from Cloud Security Alliance is proposed for CCF. The proposed mechanism is implemented as a component of a centralized broker to enhance the quality of the selection process for participants within a federation. Our experimental results show that AgCA is a useful tool for partner selection in a dynamic, heterogeneous and multilevel cloud federation.