Defining Intercloud Federation Framework for Multi-provider Cloud Services Integration

This paper presents the on-going research to define the Intercloud Federation Framework (ICFF) which is a part of the general Intercloud Architecture Framework (ICAF) proposed by the authors. ICFF attempts to address the interoperability and integration issues in provisioning on-demand multi-provider multi-domain heterogeneous cloud infrastructure services. The paper describe the major Intercloud federation scenarios that in general involves two type of federations: customer-side federation that includes federation between cloud based services and customer campus or enterprise infrastructure; and providerside federation that is created by a group of cloud providers to outsource or broker their resources when provisioning services to customers. The proposed ICFF uses cloud resources brokering model as the main operational model in typically non-coordinated Intercloud and multi-cloud environment. The paper analyses federated identity management scenarios and related design patterns that actually creates a basis for operating federations and providing consistent federated access control infrastructure. The paper also refers to successful virtual organisation experience in Grids and attempts to re-use it in ICFF. The presented work attempts to provide an architectural model for developing Intercloud middle-ware and in the way will facilitate cloud interoperability and integration.