Inter-Cloud Computing Architecture

With the rapid rise in digital content, cloud computing has become the focus of academia and industry. Cloud computing comes with sophisticated technologies for data storage, management, and distribution. Ubiquitous access facility and pay-as-you-go billing features are additional advantages associated with this paradigm. However, the massive digital content, more importantly multimedia, has to be managed in a more effective way. Heterogeneous cloud customers, accessing different customized services, with more advanced access networks and devices available today, makes it tough at times for solitary clouds to fulfill the needs. In such cases, different clouds have to interoperate and federate their resources. This scenario is called inter-cloud computing of cloud federation. Since the concept of inter-cloud computing is still very new, it lacks standard architecture. This document focuses on presenting architectural fundamentals and key concerns associated with inter-cloud computing.