Architectural Model and Security Mechanisms for Cloud Federations

The concept of cloud federation, which recently became the focus of ongoing studies, enables cloud providers to establish trusts relationships and share resources and services. This paper presents an architectural model composed by software entities that provide the required support for building cloud federations, and specifies the algorithms for interaction between these entities for locating and acquiring resources in federated cloud providers. In this model, resources are located and obtained through a resource panel, which allows cloud providers to inform their resource needs, contracts established by providers are managed by resource brokers, and an identity provider is responsible for authentication and authorization support. Experimental results obtained through simulation demonstrate the feasibility of the proposed architectural model for cloud federations.