Simple Cloud Federation

Abstract

Hybrid clouds help in establishing a cost effective, reliable and scalable solution to limitations in traditional on-premise data-center. There is an increasing requirement for federated hybrid cloud solutions to allow private clouds to leverage different public cloud providers. Federated cloud solutions should accommodate infrastructure constraints, balance load between different clouds and keep the cost at a minimal for the client. The following paper proposes an architecture for hybrid clouds called Simple Cloud Federation (SCF). It differs from existing architectures in that it leverages the hierarchical organization features already found in existing cloud systems. It is thus general and easy to implement across a variety of cloud systems, including OpenStack and Amazon. The paper contains details of our OpenStack implementation.