An Analysis of the Voluntary Aspect in Cloud Federations

With both the consolidation and the wide adoption of the cloud computing paradigm, some limitations inherent to this technology appear, hampering the effective and plain use of the paradigm to its full extent. To overcome such limitations, service providers can organize themselves into associations with the objective to surpass existing barriers in offering quality of service and scalability. Within the possible organization of multiple clouds, the Cloud Federation is an architecture that is regulated by a federative contract promoted by voluntary organizations participating in the federation. However, there is no consensus or classification of which voluntary characteristics exist and how they take place and impact in a multicloud organization. In this paper we discuss aspects of voluntary behavior in multiple cloud organizations and bring to discussion how these aspects affect the cloud federation characteristics.