Specifying Semantic Interoperability between Heterogeneous Cloud Resources with the FCLOUDS Formal Language

With the advent of cloud computing, different cloud providers with heterogeneous services and Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) have emerged. Hence, building an interoperable multi-cloud system becomes a complex task. Our idea is to design fclouds framework to achieve semantic interoperability in multi-clouds, i.e., to identify the common concepts between cloud APIs and to reason over them. In this paper, we propose to take advantage of the Open Cloud Computing Interface (OCCI) standard and the Alloy formal specification language to define the fclouds language, which is a formal language for specifying heterogeneous cloud APIs. To do so, we formalize OCCI concepts and operational semantics, then we identify and validate five properties (consistency, sequentiality, reversibility, idempotence and safety) that denote their characteristics. To demonstrate the effectiveness of our cloud formal language, we present thirteen case studies where we formally specify infrastructure, platform, Internet of Things (IoT) and transverse cloud concerns. Thanks to the Alloy analyzer, we verify that these heterogeneous APIs uphold the properties of fclouds and also validate their own specific properties. Then, thanks to formal transformation rules and equivalence properties, we draw a precise alignment between our case studies, which promotes semantic interoperability in a multi-cloud system.