An approach to identify the optimal cloud in cloud federation

Enterprises are migrating towards cloud computing for their ability to provide agility, robustness and feasibility in operations. To increase the reliability and availability of services, clouds have grown into federated clouds i.e., union of clouds. There are still major issues in federated clouds, which when solved could lead to increased satisfaction to both service providers and clients alike. One such issue is to select the optimal foreign cloud amongst the federation, which provides services according to the client requirements. In this paper, we propose a model to select the optimal cloud service provider based on the capability and performance of the available clouds in the federation. We use two matrix models to obtain the capability and performance parametric values. They are matched with the client requirements and the optimal foreign cloud service provider is selected.