Intercloud Architecture Framework for Interoperability and Integration

This report presents on-going research to develop the Intercloud Architecture Framework (ICAF) that addresses interoperability and integration issues in multi-provider multi-domain heterogeneous Cloud based infrastructure services and applications provisioning, including integration and interoperability with the legacy infrastructure services. Cloud technologies are evolving as a common way of infrastructure services and resources virtualisation and provisioning on-demand. In this way, they bring applications and infrastructure services mobility and physical/hardware platform independency to the existing distributed computing and networking technologies. The report refers to existing standards in Cloud Computing, in particular, recently published NIST Cloud Computing Reference Architecture (CCRA). The proposed Intercloud Architecture Framework defines five complimentary components addressing Intercloud interoperability and integration: multi-layer Cloud Services Model (CSM) that combines commonly adopted cloud service models, such as IaaS, PaaS, SaaS, with the underlying resources virtualisation layers and upper access and delivery layer; Intercloud Control and Management Plane (ICCMP) that supports cloud based applications interaction; Intercloud Federation Framework (ICFF), Intercloud Operation Framework (ICOF), and Intercloud Security Framework. The current version incorporates recent developments on defining the ICFF basic operational model and architecture patterns that includes customer side federation and provider side federation models. The report briefly presents the architectural framework for cloud based infrastructure services provisioned on-demand being developed by authors that can be used as a basis for building multilayer cloud services integration framework that can allow optimised provisioning of both computing, storage and networking resources. The proposed architecture is intended to provide a conceptual model for developing Intercloud middleware and in this way will facilitate clouds interoperability and integration.