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Interoperation Between Cloud Infrastructures

Release of OpenNebula Cloud Plug-in for ElasticHosts

A Distributed Virtual Infrastructure (VI) Manager is responsible for the efficient management of the virtual infrastructure as a whole, by providing functionality for deployment, control and monitoring of groups of interconnected Virtual Machines (VMs) across a pool of resources. An added functionality of these management tools is the dynamic scaling of the virtual infrastructure with resources from remote providers, so seamless integrating remote Cloud resources with in-house infrastructures. This novel functionality allows to add and remove capacity in order to meet peak or fluctuating service demands, so providing the foundation for interoperation between Cloud infrastructures. The distributed virtual infrastructure would run on top of a geographically distributed physical infrastructure consisting of resources from the private cloud and several external cloud providers.


Following the terminology defined by the Grid community for getting Grids to work together, we use the term interoperation for the set of techniques to get production Cloud infrastructures to work together using adapters and gateways. While interoperability would refer to the ability of Cloud infrastructures to interact directly via common open standards.

Since release 1.0OpenNebula distribution includes the plugins required to supplement local resources with Amazon EC2 resources to satisfy peak or fluctuating demands. This novel feature has been illustrated in several use cases for computing clusters and web servers. The open and flexible architecture of OpenNebula enables to create new plugins to access other cloud providers. In order to illustrate this and to provide KVM users with an utility access to remote resources, the OpenNebula team has just released the plugins required to dynamically grow the infrastructure using ElasticHosts resourcesElasticHosts is the world’s first public cloud based upon KVM, providing scalable and flexible virtual server capacity for cloud hosting. An interesting result is that a private infrastructure could dynamically grow using resources from different Cloud providers according to provisioning policies based on resource availability, performance, costs, availability...

The release of these new plugins represents a new step towards an open-source framework for cloud infrastructure federation, which is one of the main goasl of the Reservoir project, European research initiative in virtualized infrastructures and cloud computing.

More Stories By Ignacio M. Llorente

Ignacio M. Llorente, Ph.D in Computer Science and Executive MBA, is a Full Professor in Computer Architecture and Technology, and the Head of the Distributed Systems Architecture Research Group at Complutense University of Madrid. He has held several appointments as an independent expert for the European Commission (Information Society and Media Directorate-General); visiting positions at the Institute for Computer Applications in Science and Engineering (NASA Langley Research Center, Hampton, VA); consultancy positions with Sun Microsystems; and a Senior Researcher position in the Advanced Computing Lab at CAB (associated to NASA Astrobiology Institute). He has 17 years of experience in research and development of advanced distributed computing and virtualization technologies, architecture of large-scale distributed infrastructures and resource provisioning platforms, and management of international projects and initiatives on Grid and Cloud computing; having led the research group in 15 sponsored projects; and having published more than 130 scientific papers in the leading journals and proceedings books. He is currently co-leading the research and development of the OpenNebula Virtual Infrastructure Engine, the Globus GridWay Metascheduler, and the Grid4Utility initiative for federation of Grids. He participates in the EGEE and BEinGRID European projects, as UCM partner responsible, and in the Globus Alliance, as chair of one of its projects; and coordinates the Activity on Management of Virtual Execution Environments in the RESERVOIR Project, main EU-funded research initiative in virtualized infrastructures and cloud computing. He is the Grid Community Liaison Coordinator for the Service Oriented Infrastructure Working Group of NESSI; and co-chairs the OGF Working Group on Open Cloud Computing Interface. He coordinates the Middleware Activity in the Spanish Initiative in e-Science and the Working Group on Service Oriented Infrastructures and Grids of INES.