VegaWarden: A Uniform User Management System for Cloud Applications

Abstract

In a virtual cluster based Cloud Computing environment, the sharing of infrastructure introduces two problems on user management: usability and security. Meanwhile, we observe that most conventional user management frameworks in the network environment are not fit for the scale expansion and interconnection of dynamic virtualization environment. In this paper, we propose VegaWarden, a uniform user management system to solve these problems. VegaWarden supplies a global user space for different virtual infrastructures and application services in one Cloud, and allows user system interconnection among homogeneous Cloud instances. A uniform authentication model enables the security isolation of different administrative domains, and a decentralized architecture ensures its scalability. We have implemented VegaWarden in an experimental Cloud-oriented infrastructure and a production Grid Computing environment. The functionality and performance of VegaWarden have been demonstrated.