This book offers readers a quick, comprehensive and up-to-date overview of the most important methodologies, technologies, APIs and standards related to the portability and interoperability of cloud applications and services, illustrated by a number of use cases representing a variety of interoperability and portability scenarios.

The lack of portability and interoperability between cloud platforms at different service levels is the main issue affecting cloud-based services today. The brokering, negotiation, management, monitoring and reconfiguration of cloud resources are challenging tasks for developers and s of cloud applications due to the different business models associated with resource consumption, and to the variety of services and features offered by different cloud providers.

In chapter 1 the concepts of cloud portability and interoperability are introduced, together with the issues and limitations arising when such features are lacking or ignored. Subsequently, chapter 2 provides an overview of the state-of-the-art methodologies and technologies that are currently used or being explored to enable cloud portability and interoperability. Chapter 3 illustrates the main cross-platform cloud APIs and how they can solve interoperability and portability issues. In turn, chapter 4 presents a set of ready-to-use solutions which, either because of their broad-scale use in cloud computing scenarios or because they utilize established or emerging standards, play a fundamental part in providing interoperable and portable solutions. Lastly, chapter 5 presents an overview of emerging standards for cloud Interoperability and portability.

Researchers and developers of cloud-based services will find here a brief survey of the relevant methodologies, APIs and standards, illustrated by case studies and complemented by an extensive reference list for more detailed descriptions of every topic covered.