Towards Federation and Interoperability of Cloud Storage Systems

Abstract

While it is common to use storage in a cloud-based manner, the question of true interoperability is rarely fully addressed. This question becomes even more relevant since the steadily growing amount of data that needs to be stored will supersede the capacity of a single system in terms of resources, availability, and network throughput quite soon. The logical conclusion is that a network of systems needs to be created that is able to cope with the requirements of big data applications and data deluge scenarios. This chapter shows how federation and interoperability will fit into a cloud storage scenario. The authors take a look at the challenges that federation imposes on autonomous, heterogeneous, and distributed cloud systems, and present approaches that help deal with the special requirements introduced by the VISION Cloud use cases from healthcare, media, telecommunications, and enterprise domains. Finally, the authors give an overview on how VISION Cloud addresses these requirements in its research scenarios and architecture.

Building Information Modeling data interoperability for Cloud-based collaboration: Limitations and opportunities

“…39 It also supports data exchange and mapping of different data structures that are in different formats such as XML and Electronic Data Interchange (EDI). 38 MuleSoft has an integration package that provides integration solutions for Cloud and on premise applications for developers to connect applications to exchange data. To manage the API, it supports many data transfer protocols as well as data delivery style.…”

“…40 In general, current Cloud integration solutions structure the integration of two or more application as a new system and do not allow for a loosely coupled collaboration. 38 These solutions are tightly coupled and if any of the applications change their data format or interface requirements, this can cause interaction failure requiring the data integration system to be updated. These Cloud interoperability solutions suffer from vendor lock-in and several problems with resource management and data sharing while each one uses their own interoperability framework and data schema.…”

“…27 These integration solutions follow a configuration approach rather than programmatic interoperability. 38 Thus, these systems only identify the options available for data sharing while a programmatic interoperability approach deals with a comprehensive understanding of collaborating applications and data transfer protocols for data sharing.…”

“…Data interoperability among Cloud applications has been an ongoing challenge. 38 Several Cloud integration solutions provide integration services across the interfaces of collaborating applications. These services can provide data integration among both Cloud applications and on premise.…”

“…It allows integration to be executed on its Cloud service or on premise solutions and devices. 38 Its integration approach follows a direct and pair-wise federation with data synchronization and it does not support data sharing within a loosely coupled collaboration. 8 On top of its platform, it deploys and configures plug-ins.…”