Contrail Virtual Execution Platform Challenges in Being Part of a Cloud Federation - (Invited Paper)

Cloud computing is quickly defining the computing paradigm in the modern networked age. Users can run their large computations online using cloud services at a fraction of the cost compared to setting their own data centers. Clearly cloud computing offers many advantages, and yet many large organizations including governments, financial sector, and health care sector are reluctant in transitioning to cloud computing. Contrail project will address the major concerns behind this reluctance namely mistrust in cloud platforms, lack of Service Level Agreements (SLAs) and Quality of Protection (QoP) of data. Contrail will provide a federation layer support for bringing a multitude of cloud providers, both private and public, together. This will allow multi-tenancy and cloudbursting capability to end user cloud applications while supporting SLAs and QoP agreements desired by several privacy aware sectors including governments, banks, health care providers to name a few. This paper describes the novel features we are building into the Contrail Virtual Execution Platform (VEP) that will be closely interfaced with the IaaS layer of cloud providers. VEP upgrades the supported cloud providers and brings trust in cloud computing by adding SLAs and QoP features missing at typical IaaS layer. Further this paper outlines challenges faced in being part of a large federation and how VEP will address some of those.