Towards an Ontology for Cloud Services

Abstract

The emergence of cloud computing has created a shift in the service lifecycle, a shift meant to meet the requirements of cloud environments. Anticipating this, cloud governance, a step forward from SOA governance, tries to consolidate an environment where collaboration between various enterprises can be easily achieved. Cloud governance lays the groundwork for enabling easy application development and deployment by providing critical services that range from service management to security, monitoring and audit. As means of support for cloud computing, several ontologies have tried to bridge gaps and provide interoperability. None, however, have taken the time to analyze and define aspects that relate to service lifecycle and cloud governance. In this regard, our article proposes an ontology that is meant to complement existing ones.