Experiences in Building Micro-cloud Provider Federation in the Guifi Community Network

Abstract

Cloud federation is foreseen to happen among large cloud providers. The resulting interoperability of cloud services among these providers will then increase even more the elasticity of cloud services. The cloud provisioned that is targeted by this scenario is mainly one which combines the cloud services offered by large enterprises. Cloud computing, however, has started moving to the edge. We now increasingly see the tendency to fullfil cloud computing requirements by multiple levels and different kind of infrastructures, where the Fog Computing paradigm has started playing its role. For this scenario of edge computing, we show in this paper the case of the federation of multiple independent micro-cloud providers within a community network, where providers pool their resources and services into a community cloud. Federation happens here primarily at the service level and the domain of trust is the community of practice. While we can today already report this case in the context of community networks, IPv6 deployment in the Internet will principally allow micro-cloud providers to appear everywhere, needing cloud federation mechanisms. We describe for a real case how this micro-cloud provider federation has been built and argue why micro-cloud provider should be considered for the integration in cloud federations.