Test of cloud federation in CHAIN-REDS project

Cloud Computing is considered a successful technology, involving distributed computation infrastructures, which take advantage of the virtualization of physical resources to actuate useful scale economies. In cloud ecosystems today, attention increasingly focuses on cooperation issues, mostly in the wider context of federation. Cloud federation refers to the process of interconnecting different cloud infrastructures for resource load balancing and to manage demand spikes. One of the biggest advantages of a federated cloud consists of the possibility of distributing the workload over different cloud providers, rather than obtaining cloud services from just a single supplier. In addition, federation could be very important for Big Data, for example, to implement policies allowing migration for virtual machines involved in data analysis next to storage hosting Big Data. Federation, automation, standards, and interoperability are crucial for cloud computing services to be successful in the near future. Standards are crucial for both interoperability and federation, and federation is the first step toward interoperability. The idea we describe in this paper comes from the assumption that some of Cloud Infrastructure offering IaaS (e.g., OpenStack, OpenNebula) provide interfaces based on the OCCI standard, but lack an interconnecting cooperation/federation awareness layer. We propose a software infrastructure able to provide a homogeneous interface among different Cloud managers, in order to coordinate the IaaS resources in a transparent and distributed manner. We have implemented such software, based on CLEVER, a novel Cloud Middleware jointly developed by INFN Catania and the University of Messina, which uses XMPP as interconnecting communication protocol. We also present: