A Requirements Analysis for IaaS Cloud Federation
Alfonso Panarello, Antonio Celesti, Maria Carolina Fazio, Massimo Villari, Antonio Puliafito · 2014
The advent of the cloud computing paradigm offers different ways both to sell services and to exploit external computational resources according to a pay-per-use economic model. Cloud computing offers more and more business opportunities, and thanks to the concept of virtualization, different types of cost-effective cloud-based services have been rising. There is another perspective which represents a further business opportunity for small/medium providers which hold physical datacenters, known as Cloud federation. The cloud computing ecosystem includes hundreds of independent and heterogeneous clouds. Most of such cloud platforms can be considered as “islands in the ocean of the cloud computing” and do not present any form of federation. A possible future alternative scenario is represented by the promotion of cooperation among small/medium cloud providers, thus enabling the sharing of computational and storage resources. Federation of clouds can happen at the three typical levels of abstraction, i.e., infrastructure, platform, and software as a service (IaaS, PaaS, and SaaS). In this paper, we provide an analysis of the requirement for the establishment of an IaaS Cloud federation.