A common API for delivering services over multi-vendor cloud resources

The increasing pace of evolution in business computing services leads enterprises to outsource secondary operations that are not part of their core business. The cloud computing market has been growing over the past few years and, consequently, many cloud companies are now offering a rich set of features to their consumers. Unfortunately, those cloud players have created new services with different APIs, which imply that cloud-oriented applications might be instantiated in one single cloud provider. This scenario is not desirable to the IT industry because their applications will become provider-dependent. In this paper we present a platform that allows applications to interoperate with distinct cloud providers' services using a normalized interface. The proposed approach provides a common API that minimizes the present deficit of cloud API standardization and provides secure and redundant services allocation. Moreover, services from different cloud providers can be combined and decorated with additional functionalities like, for instance, redundancy and ciphering on-the-fly.