Defining Intercloud Federation Framework for Multi-provider Cloud Services Integration
Marc X. Makkes, Canh Ngo, Yuri Demchenko, Rudolf J. Strijkers, Robert Meijer, Cees de Laat · UvA-DARE (University of Amsterdam) · 2013
This paper presents the on-going research to define the Intercloud Federation Framework (ICFF) which is a part of the general Intercloud Architecture Framework (ICAF) proposed by the authors. ICFF attempts to address the interoperability and integration issues in provisioning on-demand multi-provider multi-domain heterogeneous cloud infrastructure services. The paper describe the major Intercloud federation scenarios that in general involves two type of federations: customer-side federation that includes federation between cloud based services and customer campus or enterprise infrastructure; and providerside federation that is created by a group of cloud providers tooutsource or broker their resources when provisioning services to customers. The proposed ICFF uses cloud resources brokering model as the main operational model in typically non-coordinated Intercloud and multi-cloud environment. The paper analyses federated identity management scenarios and related design patterns that actually creates a basis for operating federations and providing consistent federated access control infrastructure. The paper also refers to successful virtual organisation experience in Grids and attempts to re-use it in ICFF. The presented work attempts to provide an architectural model for developing Intercloud middle-ware and in the way will facilitate cloud interoperability and integration.