Critical evaluation on jClouds and Cloudify abstract APIs against EC2, Azure and HP-Cloud

With Cloud Computing there comes new possibilities like programmability of Infrastructure via provider exposed APIs. These APIs can aid the concept of elasticity that is associated with the Cloud however, there is a trend that these APIs are provider specific in the abstract of functionality and interface. There are yet no governing standards for the provision of Cloud APIs. One method to overcome this lack of standards is Open APIs like jClouds and Cloudify. This paper reviews literature and proposes eight criteria and fifty-five sub-criteria that can be used to evaluate jClouds and Cloudify. The evaluation will be performed on the creation of a web service based cloud console prototype with these APIs as demonstration of the most common type of Cloud Application, a Web application. This paper will propose that the use of Open APIs enhances or enables forty-eight of the sub-criteria and potentially diminishes one sub-criteria which is security related. This paper also proposes that lack of inclusion of billing APIs in Cloud Provider API offering is an area of omission.