Complex Service Provisioning in Collaborative Cloud Markets Melanie Siebenhaar, Ulrich Lampe, Tim Lehrig, Sebastian Z¨oller, Stefan Schulte, and Ralf Steinmetz Multimedia Communications Lab (KOM) Technische Universit¨ at Darmstadt, Germany Today’s cloud consumers gain a high level of flexibility by using ex- ternally provided cloud-based services. However, they have no means for requesting combined services from different clouds or for enforcing an individual quality level. Laying the foundation for market-based cloud collaborations including the negotiation of individual quality parameters is an important aspect for future cloud computing. Cloud consumers, especially enterprises are then able to request complex services with consumer-driven quality guarantees according to their individual needs and are not concerned with the problem on how to make the different components work together. In this paper, we present an approach for collaborative complex service provisioning in cloud computing and an evaluation of selected mechanisms for the negotiation of quality param- eters in such a collaborative market-based scenario. 1 Introduction Cloud computing has recently attracted a lot of attention with respect to IT architectures and aims to provide computing resources in a highly dynamic and flexible manner. In 2010, the cloud computing market reached a large market volume and its size will grow further in the next years [11]. Nevertheless, cloud computing is still in a very early stage concerning open standards and inter- faces [13], so that consumers cannot change selected cloud providers very easily. A vision aiming at these issues is a global cloud marketplace [1], which does not depend on the specifics of a certain vendor offering standardized interfaces. Such a cloud marketplace would also facilitate the combination of different services from various cloud providers and enable cloud federation scenarios [8]. Hence, it can be considered as a first step towards the Future Internet [7]. To realize the vision of a global cloud marketplace, several requirements have to be fulfilled. Quality parameters, such as reliability or availability, are especially crucial in a business environment. In order to retain control of the service quality, so-called Service Level Agreements (SLAs) can be negotiated between the service con- sumer and the cloud provider to ensure a level of quality consumers can rely on. Basically, an SLA represents a contract between two parties and defines the objectives (e.g., quality parameters) the cloud provider has to fulfill and the Melanie Siebenhaar, Ulrich Lampe, Tim Lehrig, Sebastian Zöller, Stefan Schulte, Ralf Steinmetz: Complex Service Provisioning in Collaborative Cloud Markets. In: W. Abramowicz et al. (Eds.): Proceedings of the 4th European Conference ServiceWave, no. LNCS 6994, p. 88-99, Springer, October 2011. ISBN 978-3-642-24754-5. The documents distributed by this server have been provided by the contributing authors as a means to ensure timely dissemination of scholarly and technical work on a non-commercial basis. Copyright and all rights therein are maintained by the authors or by other copyright holders, not withstanding that they have offered their works here electronically. It is understood that all persons copying this information will adhere to the terms and constraints invoked by each author's copyright. These works may not be reposted without the explicit permission of the copyright holder.