Defining inter-cloud architecture for interoperability and integration

This paper presents an on-going research to develop the Inter-Cloud Architecture, which addresses the architectural problems in multi-provider multi-domain heterogeneous cloud based applications integration and interoperability, including integration and interoperability with legacy infrastructure services. Cloud technologies are evolving into a common way to virtualize infrastructure services and to offer on-demand service provisioning. In this way, they add physical/hardware platform independency and mobility to the existing distributed computing and networking technologies. The paper uses existing standards in Cloud Computing, in particular the recently published NIST Cloud Computing Reference Architecture (CCRA) as the basis for the Inter-Cloud architecture. The proposed Inter-Cloud Architecture defines three complimentary components addressing Inter-Cloud interoperability and integration: multi-layer Cloud Services Model that combines commonly adopted cloud service models, such as IaaS, PaaS, SaaS, in one multilayer model with corresponding inter-layer interfaces; Inter-Cloud Control and Management Plane that supports cloud based applications interaction; and Inter-Cloud Federation Framework. The paper briefly presents the architectural framework for cloud based infrastructure services provisioning being developed by the authors. The proposed architecture intends to provide a basis for building multilayer cloud services integration framework and to allow optimised provisioning of computing, storage and networking resources. In this way, the proposed Inter-Cloud architecture will facilitate cloud interoperability and integration.