In recent years, we have seen the rapid emergence of a plethora of
Cloud providers with individual infrastructures, APIs and application
description formats. This heterogeneity has resulted in vendor lock-in,
which reduces consumer flexibility in terms of negotiation power,
reaction to price increases and freedom to change provider. Achieving
interoper-ability between Clouds is a means of addressing this issue. To
realise this, the use of open standards has been suggested, but the
existing standards are focused mainly on portability instead of
interoperability. Besides, this heterogenous nature of Clouds makes
inter-Cloud monitor-ing to facilitate interoperable Cloud management
difficult. In this paper, we present a novel integrated approach to
achieve interoperability be-tween Clouds and to facilitate the
management of service provisioning using multiple Clouds. The approach
is based on the integration of a holistic message bus system with
monitoring techniques. We present the design and implementation
descriptions, and based on a use case sce-nario, we demonstrate a
practical realisation of our approach.
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