A framework to support multi-cloud collaboration

With the rapid development of cloud computing, major cloud providers have launched various cloud services with different functions to meet customer's needs. Therefore, flexibility is extremely important when developers use these cloud services. However, APIs of cloud services change dozens of times annually without backward compatibility. It means developers have to adapt these clouds with manual efforts. Such efforts make the multi-cloud collaboration extremely complex and cannot meet the demand of flexibility. This paper describes a configuration-based multi-cloud collaboration framework, which can support new clouds with comprehensible configurations. Meanwhile, if cloud APIs are updated without backward compatibility, it can restore services during runtime with minimized configuration. The main technologies used in this article include automatic discovery, unified abstraction, dynamic mapping and incremental update. We tested the virtual machine and container services of seven well-known cloud providers. The system can support heterogeneous clouds well. When the APIs are updated, the system can restore services in less than 200 milliseconds. At the same time, the extra cost of our framework is acceptable to cloud users.