Using SDN for Cloud Services Provisioning: The XIFI Use-Case

Cloud-based infrastructures are becoming the de facto standard for service hosting through the innovation of traditional Data Centres (DCs). The availability of advanced multi-site service provisioning solutions (e.g., availability zones in Amazon EC2), is enabling the creation of advanced high-availability architectures for services and applications. These architectures, being highly distributed across cloud infrastructures, largely rely on the connectivity between DCs. While in the last years, the adoption of Software-defined Networking (SDN) solutions within a single cloud site is becoming a consolidated practice, their application across geographically separated data centre sites is still largely unexplored. In this paper we discuss how we plan to tackle this issue within the XIFI project, an EU FI-PPP program project that aims at creating a multi-site community cloud across Europe. We propose a backbone connectivity network service connecting XIFI DC sites that will leverage pan-European Network Research and Education (NREN)'s infrastructures, and advanced SDN solutions to ensure VM-to-VM connectivity across the sites while guaranteeing the Quality of Service (QoS) Service Level Agreements (SLAs) required by the distributed services.