Cloud Brokers
Ganesh Neelakanta Iyer, Bharadwaj Veeravalli · 2016
With the emergence of cloud computing, industry is moving its applications and products into cloud as cloud environments are characterized by several features such as autoelasticity, multitenancy and the pay-as-you-go model. It also offers a variety of services for various business ventures to improve their business offerings and to increase their revenue. With the abundance of isolated and independent cloud service providers (CSPs) existing at present, it is challenging for users to choose an appropriate CSP. This, coupled with other challenges such as security, reliability, and user lock in, has given rise to the need for a cloud broker that can act as an intermediary between cloud customers and CSPs to connect them and to help them in making their business-critical decisions. In this chapter, we address various challenges faced by cloud customers who are about to move their business into the cloud and challenges faced by the CSPs to offer market-based cloud services and competitive business offers. Then, we classify various cloud-broker mechanisms in the literature into three categories – cloud broker arbitrage, aggregation, and intermediation – and present a comprehensive study of various mechanisms and their properties. We describe a typical cloud broker architecture and use this architecture to describe various types of brokers.