An Intuitive Framework for Accessing Computing Clouds

Cloud computing introduces a novel computing paradigm that provisions on-demand computational capacity as a service. Increasing numbers of users are migrating their applications to the computing Clouds to remove or reduce the costs on resource investment and management. However, individual Cloud platforms, either private or public, provide their own interfaces for customers to interact with the underlying infrastructures. This situation undoubtedly burdens the users who compute on different Clouds. In this work, we developed a generic interface that allows the user to access the diverse Clouds in a unified way. It provides utilities for requesting and invoking the services. It offers graphical views to show the Cloud information that is visible to the users. The interface also combines different Clouds into a single platform enabling inter-Cloud communications.