Open Cloud eXchange (OCX): A Pivot for Intercloud Services Federation in Multi-provider Cloud Market Environment

This paper presents results of the ongoing development of the Open Cloud eXchange (OCX) that has been proposed in the framework of the GN3plus project. Its aim is to provide cloud aware network infrastructure to power and support modern data intensive research at European universities and research organisations. The paper describes the OCX concept, architecture, design and implementation options. OCX includes 3 major components: distributed L0-L2 (optionally L3) network infrastructure that includes OCX points of presence (OCXP) interconnected with GEANT backbone; the Trusted Third Party (TTP) for building dynamic trust federations; and the marketplace to enable publishing and discovery of cloud services. OCX intends to be neutral to actual cloud services provisioning and limits its services to Layer 0 through Layer 2 in order to remain transparent to current cloud services model. The recent developments include an architectural update, API definition, integration with higher-level applications and workflow control, signaling and intercloud topology modelling and visualization. The paper reports about results and experiences learnt from the recent OCX demonstrations at the SC14 Exhibition in November 2014 that demonstrated the benefits of an OCX enabled Intercloud infrastructure for running data intensive real-time cloud applications on top of the advanced GEANT multi-gigabit network. The implemented OCX functionality allowed applications to control the network path for data transfer and service delivery connectivity between multiple Cloud Service Providers (CSPs). It was used in combination with a multi-cloud workflow management and planning application (Vampire) that enables data processing performance monitoring and migration of VMs and processes to an alternative location based on performance predictions.