Towards a scalable and efficient open cloud marketplace

Abstract

As an exchange foundation of cloud software services, the cloud marketplace plays an important role to promote the capability and creativity of cloud services. However, existing cloud marketplaces are usually based on online stores operated by some particular companies. Users are usually required to get involved in their particular ecosystems, seriously restricting their creativity and competition. Moreover, these marketplaces lack efficient and flexible service publishing and discovery mechanisms. Therefore, this makes them difficult to handle a huge number of dynamic cloud service exchanges efficiently. To address this issue, we propose in this paper an open cloud marketplace middleware system for cloud software services based on a service publishing and subscription model. This model extends traditional content-based distributed publish/subscribe paradigm. By introducing the matching mechanism of multidimensional contents such as service functionality, service behavior, and quality of service etc, a new distributed publish/subscribe paradigm for service publishing and subscription is proposed. This new paradigm allows service providers to publish their services to and allows service consumers to subscribe services from the open marketplace based on service descriptions and requirements. We illustrate the design of the open cloud marketplace and present our preliminary results.