Cloud Portability and Interoperability

Abstract

In this chapter the notions of cloud portability and interoperability are introduced, together with the issues and limitations arising when such features are lacking or ignored. The illustration starts with definitions of portability and interoperability as inherent to the generality of software systems, and then the concepts are tailored, specialized, and exemplified for the specificity of cloud computing. Some basic concepts of the cloud and reference architectures are reported to define the recurrent terms and roles. A number of use cases, accompanied with a concrete case study representing a variety of interoperability and portability scenarios are illustrated. The several definitions and use case scenarios are modeled by means of an n-dimensional feature space, where features represent the several characteristics and abstraction levels of the cloud domain. The feature space, the use case scenarios, and the case study are utilized in the following chapters in order to position, classify, and demonstrate the different technologies and solutions presented.