FedUp! cloud federation as a service

Abstract

Current solutions for establishing federations of clouds require applications to be installed on the individual members of the federation, which have to devote a certain amount of resources to services for federation managing. Moreover, additional interoperability requirements may need to be satisfied by individual clouds in order to join a federation. This situation may negatively affect the decision whether to join a federation. In this paper we propose an alternative approach by viewing creation and management of a cloud federation as cloud services themselves, thus allowing a drastic simplification in the federation set-up process and the decoupling of the federation management services from the technologies adopted by the individual clouds, minimising technological complexity and intrusiveness in the individual cloud infrastructures, while increasing the flexibility and scalability of resources. We also point out that existing technologies, in particular containers, microservices, configurators, clusters and orchestrators, can be the basis for implementing a platform for generation and management of federations of individual clouds, in a way which facilitates optimisation of workload and scaling of applications via resource aggregation, and makes deploying and joining federations fast, easy, and transparent.