Selection and provisioning of services in a cloud using recommender systems approach for SMME

Abstract

Cloud computing is an information and communication technology (ICT) that delivers services through the internet. The concept of discovering, brokering, selection and reliability is important in cloud computing as it has emerged as an important new field, distinguished from conventional distributed computing by its focus on large-scale resource sharing and delivery innovative applications. This paper builds an architecture that can be used for the selection of services on the cloud. Since South African Government has prioritised entrepreneurship and the advancement of Small, Medium and Micro Enterprises (SMMEs) as the catalyst to achieving economic growth and development the application domain for service selection in this paper are SMMEs. In service oriented environments, service composition is necessitated by the fact that in such environments, there may be no single service that meets the required functionality and the fact that a combination of services may need less investment capabilities than a single service. The usage of cloud technology across different service provisioning environments has increased the challenges associated with service selection and discovery. Although having a rich set of terms that can be used to easily express requirements for the desired service, a more detailed and specific user interface would suffice in making it easy for the user to express their requirements using high level constructs.