Cloud federations in contrail.

Cloud computing infrastructures support dynamical and flexible access to computational, network and storage resources. To date, several disjoint industrial and academic technologies provide infrastruc- ture level access to Clouds. Especially for industrial platforms, the evolu- tion of de-facto standards goes together with worries about user lock-in to a platform. The Contrail project [6] proposes a federated and integrated approach to Clouds. In this work we present and motivate the architec- ture of Contrail federations. Contrail's goal is to minimize the burden on the user and increase the efficiency in using Cloud platforms by perform- ing both a vertical and a horizontal integration. To this end, Contrail federations play a key role, allowing users to exploit resources belonging to different cloud providers, regardless of the kind of technology of the providers and with a homogeneous, secure interface. Vertical integration is achieved by developing both the Infrastructure- and the Platform-as- a-Service levels within the project. A third key point is the adoption of a fully open-source approach toward technology and standards. Beside supporting user authentication and applications deployment, Contrail federations aim at providing extended SLA management functionalities, by integrating the SLA management approach of SLA@SOI project in the federation architecture.