ACSmI: A solution to address the challenges of Cloud services federation and monitoring towards the Cloud Continuum

The evolution of cloud computing has changed the way in which cloud service providers offer their services and how cloud customers consume them, moving towards the usage of multiple cloud services, in what is called multi-cloud. Multi-cloud is gaining interest by the expansion of IoT, edge computing, and the cloud continuum, where distributed cloud federation models are necessary for effective application deployment and operation. This work presents ACSmI (Advanced Cloud Service Meta-Intermediator), a solution that implements a cloud federation, supporting the seamless brokerage of cloud services. Technical details addressing the discovered shortcomings are presented, including a proof of concept built on JHipster, Java, InfluxD, Telegraf, and Grafana. ACSmI contributes to relevant elements of the European Gaia-X initiative, specifically to the federated catalog, continuous monitoring, and certification of services. The experiments show that the proposed solution effectively saves up to 75% of the DevOps team's effort to discover, contract, and monitor cloud services