How often have we considered the challenges of meeting service level expectations to a global marketplace, in a global economy, with a very demanding customer? Every day?
Ten years ago most companies were happy to simply have a web presence, being able to extend their image and company profile throughout the connected world. As business began to rely on real time, business-2-business transactions, the need for a high performance network and application evolved to the point no company can exist today without being part of the connected marketplace.
Users expect open APIs, near zero latency, and the ability to integrate both provisioning and accounting systems across corporate lines.
Federated Clouds
The folks at the University of Melbourne’s “CLOUDS” Laboratory have published a study on InterCloud – or the future potential of federating cloud services and providers to allow users better control over their proximity-based processing, as well as on-demand processing capabilities.
The study cites a continuing challenge facing the cloud service provider community, specifically how to:
- dynamically expand or resize their provisioning capability based on sudden spikes in workload demands by leasing available computational and storage capabilities from other Cloud service providers;
- operate as parts of a market driven resource leasing federation, where application service providers host their services based on negotiated Service Level Agreement (SLA) contracts driven by competitive market prices; and
- deliver on-demand, reliable, cost-effective, and QoS (Quality of Service) aware services based on virtualization technologies while ensuring high QoS standards and minimizing service costs.
Now we’ve considered all these topics either individually or collectively in the past. We all want on-demand processing capacity, at the lowest cost, and at the best proximity to our users. The challenge has always been getting past the desire for cloud software vendors, and some cloud service providers to attempt market dominance through producing proprietary software, without any desire to produce a standardized provisioning interface (although some have made half-hearted attempts participating in dead-end standards organizations).
However, very few cloud service providers have a global presence, nor is there any realistic expectation one cloud operating system, virtualization platform, or SaaS application will meet the needs of all users.
Therefore, cloud federations – or the ability to provision across platforms, vendors, and geographies on demand, make sense for both the industry and the market. This will allow individual cloud service providers to build partners and quickly expand their markets well beyond a single location or region.
The CLOUD Lab promotes a vision of “focusing on design, development, and implementation of software systems and policies for federation of Clouds across network and administrative boundaries. The key elements for enabling federation of Clouds and auto-scaling application services are: Cloud Coordinators, Brokers, and an Exchange.”
The Cloud Exchange
If we consider the value and utility of an Internet Exchange Point/IXP, we can apply many of the same ideas to the cloud. An IXP allows Internet service providers and content providers to interconnect their networks at a single location and bypass transit or intermediate networks. A Cloud Exchange (CEx) as envisioned by the Melbourne team creates a spot market for cloud services.
A cloud provider is able to announce their available or on-demand excess processing and storage capacity to the exchange, and end users are able to provision into the CEx though business rules as defined by the CEx.
The CEx has three main components, providing directory services, dynamic bidding, and payment management services.
- Directory: The market directory allows the global CEx participants to locate providers or consumers with appropriate bids/offers. Cloud providers can publish their available supply of resources and their offered prices. Cloud consumers can then search for suitable providers and submit their bids for required resources
- Auctioneer: Auctioneers periodically clear bids and asks received from the global CEx participants.
- Bank: The banking system enforces financial transactions pertaining to agreements between the global CEx participants.
Cloud and Compute/Storage Resource as a Utility
The Melbourne CLOUD team’s vision of cloud federations brings us one step closer to Nicholas Carr’s idea of compute resources as a utility. At some point in the future cloud computing, cloud service providers, cloud exchanges, and cloud federations will bring us one step closer to being able to expect processing capacity at the same level as we expect water, electricity, and roads.
The fourth utility. A combination of network access, processing power, software as a service, and storage as a basic utility offered to all persons as an expected service. Cloud federations and exchanges may bring that vision one large step closer.
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