Interoperable Federated Cloud Networking

The BEACON framework enables the provision of federated cloud infrastructures, with special emphasis on inter-cloud networking and security issues, to support the automated deployment of applications and services across different clouds and datacenters. BEACON is distributed as open source (see http://github.com/BeaconFramework) and some enhancements are being contributed to the OpenNebula and OpenStack cloud management platforms

InterCloud: Utility-Oriented Federation of Cloud Computing Environments for Scaling of Application Services

Cloud computing providers have setup several data centers at different geographical locations over the Internet in order to optimally serve needs of their customers around the world. However, existing systems do not support mechanisms and policies for dynamically coordinating load distribution among different Cloud-based data centers in order to determine optimal location for hosting application services to achieve reasonable QoS levels. Further, the Cloud computing providers are unable to predict geographic distribution of users consuming their services, hence the load coordination must happen automatically, and distribution of services must change in response to changes in the load. To counter this problem, we advocate creation of federated Cloud computing environment (InterCloud) that facilitates just-in-time, opportunistic, and scalable provisioning of application services, consistently achieving QoS targets under variable workload, resource and network conditions. The overall goal is to create a computing environment that supports dynamic expansion or contraction of capabilities (VMs, services, storage, and database) for handling sudden variations in service demands. This paper presents vision, challenges, and architectural elements of InterCloud for utility-oriented federation of Cloud computing environments. The proposed InterCloud environment supports scaling of applications across multiple vendor clouds. We have validated our approach by conducting a set of rigorous performance evaluation study using the CloudSim toolkit. The results demonstrate that federated Cloud computing model has immense potential as it offers significant performance gains as regards to response time and cost saving under dynamic workload scenarios.Comment: 20 pages, 4 figures, 3 tables, conference pape

Opportunities and Challenges of Joint Edge and Fog Orchestration

Pushing contents, applications, and network functions closer to end users is necessary to cope with the huge data volume and low latency required in future 5G networks. Edge and fog frameworks have emerged recently to address this challenge. Whilst the edge framework was more infrastructure focused and more mobile operator-oriented, the fog was more pervasive and included any node (stationary or mobile), including terminal devices. This article analyzes the opportunities and challenges to integrate, federate, and jointly orchestrate the edge and fog resources into a unified framework.This work has been partially funded by the H2020 collaborative Europe/Taiwan research project 5G-CORAL (grant num. 761586

End-to-end slices to orchestrate resources and services in the cloud-to-edge continuum

Fog computing, combined with traditional cloud computing, offers an inherently distributed infrastructure – referred to as the cloud-to-edge continuum – that can be used for the execution of low-latency and location-aware IoT services. The management of such an infrastructure is complex: resources in multiple domains need to be accessed by several tenants, while an adequate level of isolation and performance has to be guaranteed. This paper proposes the dynamic allocation of end-to-end slices to perform the orchestration of resources and services in such a scenario. These end-to-end slices require a unified resource management approach that encompasses both data centre and network resources. Currently, fog orchestration is mainly focused on the management of compute resources, likewise, the slicing domain is specifically centred solely on the creation of isolated network partitions. A unified resource orchestration strategy, able to integrate the selection, configuration and management of compute and network resources, as part of a single abstracted object, is missing. This work aims to minimise the silo-effect, and proposes end-to-end slices as the foundation for the comprehensive orchestration of compute resources, network resources, and services in the cloud-to-edge continuum, as well acting as the basis for a system implementation. The concept of the end-to-end slice is formally described via a graph-based model that allows for dynamic resource discovery, selection and mapping via different algorithms and optimisation goals; and a working system is presented as the way to build slices across multiple domains dynamically, based on that model. These are independently accessible objects that abstract resources of various providers – traded via a Marketplace – with compute slices, allocated using the bare-metal cloud approach, being interconnected to each other via the connectivity of network slices. Experiments, carried out on a real testbed, demonstrate three features of the end-to-end slices: resources can be selected, allocated and controlled in a softwarised fashion; tenants can instantiate distributed IoT services on those resources transparently; the performance of a service is absolutely not affected by the status of other slices that share the same resource infrastructure

Addressing the Challenges in Federating Edge Resources

This book chapter considers how Edge deployments can be brought to bear in a global context by federating them across multiple geographic regions to create a global Edge-based fabric that decentralizes data center computation. This is currently impractical, not only because of technical challenges, but is also shrouded by social, legal and geopolitical issues. In this chapter, we discuss two key challenges - networking and management in federating Edge deployments. Additionally, we consider resource and modeling challenges that will need to be addressed for a federated Edge.Comment: Book Chapter accepted to the Fog and Edge Computing: Principles and Paradigms; Editors Buyya, Sriram

End-to-end slices to orchestrate resources and services in the cloud-to-edge continuum

Fog computing, combined with traditional cloud computing, offers an inherently distributed infrastructure – referred to as the cloud-to-edge continuum – that can be used for the execution of low-latency and location-aware IoT services. The management of such an infrastructure is complex: resources in multiple domains need to be accessed by several tenants, while an adequate level of isolation and performance has to be guaranteed. This paper proposes the dynamic allocation of end-to-end slices to perform the orchestration of resources and services in such a scenario. These end-to-end slices require a unified resource management approach that encompasses both data centre and network resources. Currently, fog orchestration is mainly focussed on the management of compute resources, likewise, the slicing domain is specifically centred solely on the creation of isolated network partitions. A unified resource orchestration strategy, able to integrate the selection, configuration and management of compute and network resources, as part of a single abstracted object, is missing. This work aims to minimise the silo-effect, and proposes end-to-end slices as the foundation for the comprehensive orchestration of compute resources, network resources, and services in the cloud-to-edge continuum, as well acting as the basis for a system implementation. The concept of the end-to-end slice is formally described via a graph-based model that allows for dynamic resource discovery, selection and mapping via different algorithms and optimisation goals; and a working system is presented as the way to build slices across multiple domains dynamically, based on that model. These are independently accessible objects that abstract resources of various providers – traded via a Marketplace – with compute slices, allocated using the bare-metal cloud approach, being interconnected to each other via the connectivity of network slices. Experiments, carried out on a real testbed, demonstrate three features of the end-to-end slices: resources can be selected, allocated and controlled in a softwarised fashion; tenants can instantiate distributed IoT services on those resources transparently; the performance of a service is absolutely not affected by the status of other slices that share the same resource infrastructure