The high degree of distribution and heterogeneity in multi-cloud architectures leads to a massive development and management complexity for application providers. From the user's perspective, vendor lock-in is a common hindrance in cloud platforms that could involve substantial development and maintenance costs, and could extend to serious concerns such as privacy and security.

Hence, more research is called for in order to rise above the shortcomings of one solution, and to support data as well as application portability and interoperability across different cloud platforms. Sharing experiences and strategies is the obvious first step in this direction.

This JISA Thematic Series aims at providing innovative contributions to the design, implementation, and evaluation of multi-cloud and federated cloud architectures. The series presents novel research efforts and approaches in mitigating different costs associated with building multi-cloud and federated cloud systems, as well as highlighting emerging design choices and best practices in this regard.

Potential topics include, but are not limited to:
● Supporting cloud application portability: priorities, restrictions, and lock-in mitigation measures.
● Cloud API interoperability: study cases and experiences with data and applications.
● Interoperability between managed cloud services (e.g. MapReduce, DB, message queues, etc.).
● Cloud brokerage: outsource complexity to facilitate the adoption of multi-cloud architectures; Broker as a Service (BaaS), i.e. providing brokerage as an intermediate middleware service.
● Cloud-bursting: multi-cloud resource scheduling strategies.
● Meta-cloud systems: distributed systems management (load balancing, performance optimisation, enforcing security and privacy policies, etc.) across multiple cloud vendors.
● Cross-cloud SDKs and APIs: design, maintenance support and performance evaluation.
● Cloud agility: flexibility in transitioning systems (including production) between different vendors.
● Decision support systems: to support efficient and open application deployment, monitoring, and execution across different cloud service providers.
● Experiences in assembling federated / multi-cloud architectures, including highlights of costs and benefits and means of managing (re)deployment.
● Case studies in mitigating the costs associated with building federated / multi-cloud systems.
● Virtual machine portability and scheduling across different infrastructures.
● Identity and access management across infrastructure boundaries.
● Hybrid cloud infrastructures: public and private clouds, different public/private clouds, cloud and grid systems, etc.
● Reconciling non-functional application requirements (primarily privacy and security) across multiple SLAs.



Submission instructions

Before submitting your manuscript, please ensure you have carefully read the Instructions for Authors for Journal of Internet Services and Applications. The complete manuscript should be submitted through the Journal of Internet Services and Applications submission system. To ensure that you submit to the correct thematic series please select the appropriate section in the drop-down menu upon submission. All submissions will undergo rigorous peer review and accepted articles will be published within the journal as a collection.

Submission Link: http://www.jisajournal.com/manuscript

Submission deadline: April 30th
1st response from reviewers: June 30th
Publication: 3rd Quarter 2015

Lead guest editors
Yehia Elkhatib, Lancaster University, United Kingdom
Stefan Walraven, KU Leuven, Belgium

Submissions will also benefit from the usual advantages of open access publication:
● Rapid publication: Online submission, electronic peer review and production make the process of publishing your article simple and efficient
● High visibility and international readership in your field: Open access publication ensures high visibility and maximum exposure for your work - anyone with online access can read your article
● No space constraints: Publishing online means unlimited space for figures, extensive data and video footage
● Authors retain copyright, licensing the article under a Creative Commons license: articles can be freely redistributed and reused as long as the article is correctly attributed

It is the wish of the JISA team that all quality articles will be published in the journal independent of the funding capacity of the authors. Thus, if the authors are unable to pay the APC charge, we request that they contact the lead guest editors and a waiver will be granted.

For editorial enquiries please contact editorial@jisajournal.com