Interfaces for Placement, Migration, and Monitoring of Virtual Machines in Federated Clouds

Current cloud computing infrastructure offerings are lacking in interoperability, which is a hindrance to the advancement and adoption of the cloud computing paradigm. As clouds are made interoperable, federations of clouds may be formed. Such federations are from the point of view of the user not burdened by vendor lock-in, and opens for business possibilities where a market place of cloud computing infrastructure can be formed. Federated clouds require unified management interfaces regarding the virtual machines (VMs) that comprise the services running in the cloud federation. Standardization efforts for the required management interfaces have so far focused on definition of description formats regarding VMs, and the control of already deployed VMs. We propose technology neutral interfaces and architectural additions for handling placement, migration, and monitoring of VMs in federated cloud environments, the latter as an extension of current monitoring architectures used in Grid computing. The interfaces presented adhere to the general requirements of scalability, efficiency, and security in addition to specific requirements related to the particular issues of interoperability and business relationships between competing cloud computing infrastructure providers. In addition, they may be used equally well locally and remotely, creating a layer of abstraction that simplifies management of virtualized service components.