Fogbow: A Middleware for the Federation of IaaS Clouds

Abstract

This paper presents a new middleware, called Fogbow, designed to support large federations of Infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) cloud providers. Fogbow follows a novel approach that implements federation functionalities outside the cloud orchestrator. This approach provides great flexibility, since it can use plug-ins that allow for the definition of precise interaction points between the federation middleware and the underlying cloud orchestrator. The resulting architecture, which relies on standards for conciliating different orchestrators' peculiarities, is thereby able to provide a common API to decouple federation functionalities from the orchestrator functionalities. In the demonstration we will showcase how Fogbow has been used to implement several cloud federations, with different requirements.