Towards a Cloud Service Standardization to ensure interoperability in heterogeneous Cloud based environment

During the last years, because of the attractive advantages given by Cloud providers to consumers, many companies outsource their data or Information Technology (IT) system to the Cloud based technology. Many Internet protocols for service access standards exist and are used to ensure communication between user's browser and Web server, such as Representational State Transfer (REST) and Simple Object Access Protocol (SOAP). The most of Cloud providers use REST as an interface Web service because of its advantages in the Web environment. Contrariwise the SOAP Web service is used in several areas such as education and industrial fields. These client areas had a limited choice of Cloud provider that can respond to their needs, because the number of Cloud providers using SOAP Web service is restricted and each service has its specific characteristics. As a solution, we propose a Cloud SaaS middleware based on two interfaces and an internal component. This Cloud enables communication between Cloud consumer using SOAP Web service and Cloud provider using REST Web service. This is to achieve benefits such as standardization and interoperability and minimizing lock-in of Cloud providers. This paper motivates Cloud SaaS architectures and presents the architecture of the Cloud service standardization.