Access to different cloud platforms through uniform interface

This diploma thesis focuses on cloud computing, specifically on the area of IaaS oriented clouds. We introduce and compare API designs of two different cloud platforms - OpenStack and VmWare vCloud. Because cloud APIs can be significantly different, we take a deeper look at possible solutions for bridging the gap between different platforms. Two different solutions - LibCloud and jClouds are introduced. While both solutions overcome the differences in API designs, they don't provide sufficient support for selecting the right machine configurations based on provider SLAs. We present our own library - XCloud, for accessing different cloud platforms through a uniform interface that also offers its users the ability to perform SLA lookups and therefore select a cloud provider more easily. XCloud also provides a graphical interface accessible from within a web browser.