Towards a Reference Architecture for Interoperable Clouds

Abstract

Cloud computing is growing very fast in the market and has become one of the most controversial discussed developments in recent years. Cloud computing providers become very numerous in these areas and each of them prefers its own cloud computing infrastructure, due to the incompatibility of standards and cloud access formats, which prevents them from accepting to support cloud computing applications in a standardized manner, this heterogeneity creates the problem of interoperability between clouds, and considering that Cloud customers are probably in search of an interoperable Cloud Computing, where they will have total control over their applications and simply migrate their services as needed, without additional development investment. A Cloud federation strategy should be considered. In our article, we propose a common architecture for a cloud that's based on existing architectures and the also use of best practices from ICT frameworks, such as IBM, ITIL, NIST, etc., to address interoperability of architectures issues in a multi-Cloud system.