Agents Based Cloud Computing Interface for Resource Provisioning and Management

Cloud computing represents an opportunity for IT users to reduce costs and increase efficiency providing an alternative way of using IT services. In this scenario value added services for dynamic and elastic provisioning play an important role, by giving the possibility to get the best resources configuration that satisfies the application requirements. Agent technology provides asynchronous mechanisms that could represent the best choice for effective programming of Cloud, due to the unpredictable behaviour of the network. Cloud Agency is a collection of agent based services for provisioning, monitoring and autonomic reconfiguration of Cloud resources at infrastructure level, which go beyond the common offer by commercial providers and by open Cloud technologies. In this work we describe how Cloud Agency extends the Open Cloud Computing Interface (OCCI[1]) proposal of standard for the Cloud infrastructures level. We present the Cloud agency design and the implementation of an RESTfull to/from ACL gateway that allows for the communication between the Cloud world and the agents' one, being compliant with OCCI and extending its model and services.