A Cloud Storage Overlay to Aggregate Heterogeneous Cloud Services

Many Cloud services provide generic (e.g., Amazon S3 or Dropbox) or data-specific Cloud storage (e.g., Google Picasa or SoundCloud). Although Cloud service types have the data storage in common, they present heterogeneous characteristics: different interfaces, accounting and charging schemes, privacy and security levels, functionality, and, among the data-specific Cloud storage services, different data validation rules to prevent the upload of certain data types. This book presents a novel approach exploiting heterogeneous data storage of different Cloud services by building a Cloud storage overlay, which aggregates multiple Cloud storage services', providing enhanced privacy, and offering a distributed file sharing system. The solution is entitled as PiCsMu (Platform-independent Cloud Storage System for Multiple Usage). As opposed to Peer-to-Peer file sharing approaches, where data and metadata are directly stored on peers, PiCsMu uses Cloud storage systems for data storage, while only maintaining file's metadata in a full decentralized Peer-to-Peer network. The main contribution of PiCsMu is to show the feasibility to store any kind of data in different Cloud services for private use and/or for file sharing.