Flexible Federation of Cloud Providers: The EUBrazil Cloud Connect Approach

Abstract

In this work we introduce the EUBrazilCC federated cloud e-infrastructure based on Fogbow, a new middleware designed to support federation of IaaS cloud providers according to a novel approach. It is based on the provision of federation functionalities offered at a higher architectural level than current approaches by being deployed on top of the IaaS cloud orchestrators of each federation member. Fogbow is endowed with great flexibility due to the use of plugins that allow for the definition of precise interaction points between the federation middleware and the underlying cloud orchestrator. The resulting architecture, which relies on standards for conciliating different orchestrators' peculiarities, is thereby able to provide a common API to decouple federation functionalities from the orchestrator functionalities. Fogbow has been deployed to federate the private clouds of the members of the consortium of the EUBrazilCC project, and is also being used in an experimental federation that is part of the cloud initiative of the Brazilian National Research and Education Network (NREN) operator, as well as in an experimental deployment that aims at federating private clouds belonging to two large public companies in Brazil.

A survey on the service interoperability in cloud computing: Client‐centric and provider‐centric perspectives

“…Whereas, the authors of References focused on achieving a transparent and safe VM migration between hosts. However, the approaches in Reference implemented standard APIs.…”

“…In the provider‐centric category, a management REST API was proposed in Reference , storage APIs were proposed in References , and open APIs were proposed in References . The API in Reference enables interaction with providers. However, the drawback of a standardized API is that it achieves the interoperability between services, which use the same API only.…”

“…From what we observed in the literature, cloud interoperability solutions are not restricted to achieve the interoperability between services only, but also to address other aspects such as cloud portability, composition, design, deployment, discovery, migration, configuration, provisioning, adaptability monitoring, management, description, and integration …”

“…In Reference , the authors proposed EUBrazilCC federated cloud e‐infrastructure, which permits the provisioning of the federation functionalities. EUBrazilCC it is based on Fogbow, which is a flexible middleware, that is, deployed atop of IaaS cloud orchestrators and which extends OCCI API.…”

“…Although, cloud provider is a person or an organization that offers services and makes them available to the interested parties . Therefore, the approaches are classified in two categories: (i) client‐centric approaches; and (ii) provider‐centric approaches . The first category targets cloud clients to overcome the vendor lock‐in and to give clients the freedom to migrate/move their data across providers or clouds and to control their deployed applications .…”