Envisioning SLO-driven Service Selection in Multi-cloud Applications

The current large selection of cloud instances that are functionally equivalent makes selecting the right cloud service a challenging decision. We envision a model driven engineering (MDE) approach to raise the level of abstraction for cloud service selection. One way to achieve this is through a domain specific language (DSL) for modelling the service level objectives (SLOs) and a brokerage system that utilises the SLO model to select services. However, this demands an understanding of the provider SLAs and the capabilities of the current cloud modelling languages (CMLs). This paper investigates the state-of-the-art for SLO support in both cloud providers SLAs and CMLs in order to identify the gaps for SLO support. We then outline research directions towards achieving the MDE-based cloud brokerage.