Supercloud: Opportunities and Challenges

Abstract

Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) clouds couple applications tightly with the underlying infrastructures and services. This vendor lock-in problem forces users to apply ad-hoc deployment strategies in order to tolerate cloud failures, and limits the ability of doing virtual machine (VM) migration and resource scaling across different clouds. This paper presents the Supercloud, a cloud service comprising resources obtained from several diverse IaaS cloud providers, and discusses opportunities, limitations, and future research directions. Currently, the Supercloud has been deployed using resources from several major cloud providers, including Amazon EC2, Rackspace, HP Cloud, and some private clouds. VMs run in a virtual network and can be migrated seamlessly across different clouds, with different hypervisors and device models. Using case studies we demonstrate that, being able to deploy applications to more regions and granting more control to end-users, the Supercloud can reduce latency and cost compared to the underlying cloud providers.