Facilitating Cloud Federation Management via Data Interoperability

In recent years, we have experienced a rapid growth of cloud providers with individual infrastructures, APIs and application data description formats. This diversity has resulted in vendor lock-in, thereby reducing consumer flexibility in terms of negotiation power, reaction to price increases and freedom to change provider. To address this issue, strategies for achieving interoperability between clouds are essential. In line with this, efficient mechanisms for data structuring and formatting are indispensable, especially for managing data traffic between and within federated cloud environments. Some recent approaches to interoperability for federated cloud management focus mainly on the infrastructure levels, and little attention is being given to the application levels and data. In this chapter, we present an architecture to facilitate federated cloud application deployment management through investigating data interoperability across clouds. Our approach is based on the integration of monitoring techniques with a holistic message bus system. We propose a monitoring framework that gathers data for supervising multiple cloud deployments to make informed decisions. The message bus system provides a holistic communication mechanism that is capable of supporting messaging at different levels of abstraction within and between clouds. It realises interoperable communication by integrating generic data interchange formats. We present the design of the architecture, implementation choices and some practical evaluations based on a use case scenario.