Cloud Federation Management and Beyond: Requirements, Relevant Standards, and Gaps
Craig A. Lee · IEEE Cloud Computing · 2016
In cloud computing, "hybrid cloud" and "community cloud" are established jargon. These concepts, however, actually entail federation, that is, the ability to securely share compute resources. Cloud federation has been investigated at all levels of the system stack-infrastructure as a service (IaaS), platform as a service (PaaS), and software as a service (SaaS). To better understand how to accomplish secure cloud federation, the author identifies six fundamental federation requirements, six deployment models, examines relevant existing standards, and discusses areas where further work needs to be done on best practices, tooling, and standards. The author notes that federation isn't specific to on-demand cloud resources and can be used to manage arbitrary services at any level in the system stack for a wide spectrum of application domains. Hence, federation has far-reaching implications for the scale and scope of cloud-based, and bare-metal-based, collaborations.