A survey on approaches for interoperability and portability of cloud computing services

Over the recent years, the rapid development of Cloud Computing has driven to a large market of cloud services that offer infrastructure, platforms and software to everyday users. Yet, due to the lack of common\ud accepted standards, cloud service providers use different technologies and offer their clients services that are operated by a variety of proprietary APIs. The lack of standardization results in numerous heterogeneities\ud (e.g., heterogeneous service descriptions, message level naming conflicts, data representation conflicts etc.) making the interoperation, collaboration and portability of services a very complex task. In this work we\ud focus on the problems of interoperability and portability in Cloud Computing, we address their differences and we discuss some of the latest research work in this area. Finally we evaluate and point out relationships\ud between the identified solutions