Abstract: A service partitioned into service components requiring different resources is assigned to at least one cloud of a set of clouds. With interdependent service components, a service-placement engine is configured to coordinate assignments of individual service components. The service-placement engine receives from a client a definition of each service component and indications of components interdependence. Each cloud that satisfies compliance requirements, capability requirements, and resource requirements of a service component is considered eligible to host the service component. Selection of a specific eligible cloud is based on an overall cloud merit which depends on the service-component definition and the location of the client.

Abstract: Several cloud observers monitor a set of clouds to collect cloud information and communicate the information to several service placement units thus forming a distributed service-placement system. The service-placement units communicate with a population of clients to receive service-assignment requests and select at least one compatible cloud for each request. The cloud observers share the cloud-monitoring workload and the service-placement units share the cloud-assignment workload. According to a first connectivity scheme, each cloud observer has a path to each service-placement unit. According to a second connectivity scheme, the cloud observers are interconnected to pool cloud information so that each cloud observer possesses cloud information of all clouds. Each cloud observer communicates with a respective subset of the service-placement units.

Abstract: A service partitioned into service components requiring different resources is assigned to at least one cloud of a set of clouds. With interdependent service components, a service-placement engine is configured to coordinate assignments of individual service components. The service-placement engine receives from a client a definition of each service component and indications of components interdependence. Each cloud that satisfies compliance requirements, capability requirements, and resource requirements of a service component is considered eligible to host the service component. Selection of a specific eligible cloud is based on an overall cloud merit which depends on the service-component definition and the location of the client.

Abstract: An engine for allocation of cloud computing resources to clients of cloud computing facilities (simply referenced as “clouds”) collects data relevant to resource availability and characteristics of several clouds and determines for each sought service a cloud of highest service-specific appraisal. Data corresponding to each characteristic is canonicalized to produce corresponding merits for each cloud where each merit is dimensionless, bounded within a predefined interval, and oriented so that a merit increment increases an overall appraisal of a respective cloud. Consequently, a merit vector is created for each cloud. Upon receiving a service request from a client, requisite resources as well as a significance vector indicating significance of each characteristic to the requested service are determined. An appraisal of a cloud is determined as a dot product of the significance vector and the merit vector of the cloud. The cloud of highest appraisal is allocated to the service.