The 2nd International Workshop on Cloud Service Brokerage (CSB 2014) looks to a future in which a multi-cloud ecosystem exists, within which many cloud providers and consumers interact to create, discover, negotiate and use software services. Supporting this ecosystem are cloud brokers, whose role is to bring together providers and consumers, by offering service portals with added value for all parties. A central feature of the broker’s role will be to assist with software service generation (from abstract models to platform-specific deployments), multi-cloud translation (model-driven adaptation and deployment of services) and assure quality control (governance; functional testing and monitoring), service continuity (failure prevention and recovery; service substitution) and market competition (arbitrage; service optimization; service customization).
To promote the creation of this kind of ecosystem, it is necessary to develop common standards, service models, methods and mechanisms that will operate across a wide variety of platforms and infrastructure, and across disparate service protocols, which currently include: WSDL/SOAP-based services, RESTful services and Rich Client/AJAX applications.
