Inter Ecosystem Interoperability on Cloud

Survey to Solution

Abdul Razzaq1, Muhammad Asif2, Hafiz Usman Zia3

1,2,3University of Sargodha, Gujranwala Campus

Inter Ecosystem Interoperability on Cloud Survey to Solution

Abstract—Cloud definition says “everything available everywhere at any time”. As cloud computing evolves to accommodate future technologies, intercloud ecosystem is started to be required as a necessary architecture. Although there are someproposals presented to manage the intercloud but no one guarantee alock-free, interoperable and federated ecosystem. Conducted research is biased and cloud provider’s need base, pushing cloud market towards the interests of commercial dominators.To fill this gap, after surveying the maturity of open technologies and current state of adoption of the openness from cloud providers, this paper presents ICCM: Inter-Cloud Concern Model a reference architecture to model the concerns of interoperable cloud ecosystem. The aimof this research is to formally describe the aspects to be consider to design a people-centric IT solution that put computing providers in a hard competition to fulfill client needs.

Index Terms—interoperability; cloud computing; open cloud; distributed; intercloud

——————————  ——————————

1Introduction

Inter Ecosystem Interoperability on Cloud Survey to Solution

B

Y definition the cloud is extremely attractive; is a pay for what you use business model with on-demand self-service, rapid provisioning and scaling as essential characteristics [39]. The next era after internet is intercloud. However, majority of the currently available cloud models have been created for some cloud providers needs to be in hand. Therefore, cloud model are securing the concerns of a folk of providers and this biasness is the core factor that impact today’s technological and business values.

Current open and proprietary intercloud solutions are mudding the water and confusing the service-seekers by arising the following zigzag questions:

  • Whether to use DMTF OVF type open formats for interoperability [11]?
  • What if all interoperability shifted to carrier cloud? GICTF solution [19]
  • Can broker provide interoperability?? As NIST definition demands [39]
  • What if we allow to create Openstack like ecosystems [17]?
  • What majority demands? They are happy with proprietary APIs [15].
  • What if we built new internet architecture as IEEE [22]?

What is best of all? Certainly, these standards, formats, APIs and architecture designs are need to interact somewhereand a best mix of all these may be the best one. But whether the cloud provider’s organizations are agree and will be able to provide cross-ecosystem interoperability?

Diverse standards constructed by different entities in industry or government to seamlessly federate and interoperate in place for different cloud computing architectures [37] are creating extra-cloud of providing organizations. These folks of clouds are locking client more severely to their tiny ecosystem of the cloud providers and

near to demand an interoperability layer over the interoperability solution provided by them.

On the other hand, cloud has created the open resource models, open service models and open APIs for unified accessibility fashions to support cloud of clouds environment. However after such a massive research, distributed computing systems are unable to answer these long lasting questions:

  • How to force the cloud providers to adopt the open solution as a whole? Whether the clients get rid from vendor lock-in and gain the key of control?
  • Whether cloud will be able to model business and upcoming future technologies (like HPC, big data, IOT, mobile computing) in it without gaining complete trust of users?
  • How to remove the tradeoffs that come with cloud's benefits -- flexibility, scalability, automation -- with IT teams must assume less control over the infrastructure?
  • Which one is the best solution, On-premise or off-premise? Can automation be provided for client service oriented cloud manufacturing from multiple providers?

The core objective of this paper is to put forward anintercloud concern model that will protect business industry to fall in four black-holes i.e. vendor lock-in, lack of interoperability, limited client control over cloud and stubbornness of cloud to accommodate future technologies. This distinctive research will first present the vision of the inter-cloud where industry have to reach. Afterward, we critically analyzed and surveyed where the current technologies stand to design such a visionary model, subsequently, we also identify the key pitfalls in researchthat inclined the current cloud model towards cloud providers. By integrating theories and methods from cloud architectures, business models and open technologies, this unbiased research will formalize the concerns need to consider while designing intercloud model.

I.Open Cloud: A Vision to Design Intercloud

Recent and upcoming technologies are ultimately supposed to situate in cloud whereas, dynamicity of these technologies demands versatility in cloud to adapt and innovate with technology. To meet these challenges, cloud architecture need to break the walls of individualism and clustering to build solutions beyond the limitation of a set of providers and support advance interaction patterns between disparate cloud providers.

Figure 1. Basic interactive model for intercloud operations

Figure 1 presents the common interaction patterns between cloud providers. Its starts with physical layers where hardware providers horizontally interoperate with each other to virtualized and orchestrate resources for IaaS providers. Different service delivery models can be designed on this stage including IaaS, PaaS, DBaaS and SaaS. Broker on the top, designand arbitrage cross-cloud services from all these service models and present to consumers.

Cloud openness is innovation openness that drive the development of business sector. A few research groups will contend that a cloud offering is open if it has open APIs and open standards.However, customers are unable to gain a generational leap in agility, elasticity, and scalability across a pool of resources with the current definition of the openness on cloud. They required more self-service andautomation from cloud infrastructure.

Having open APIs and open standards is important, yet it's insufficient.The openness of the cloud need to redefine to enrich with pluggable, extensible, and open APIs and toempower portability and federation across clouds [9]. More importantly, cloud providers should not have dominancy in customer’s deployment choice of infrastructure. Instead, cloud providers should be intertwine inviable industry standard and independent ecosystem that committed to open source.Unbiased and client-centric research is essential to:

  • Design a sustainable, overall decentralized, scalable, self-organizing and federated “Inter-cloud” model to meet upcoming technologies and any X oriented business modeling.
  • A cloud market that let client win the complete ownership on cloud by having interoperability, federation, and management control in hand is the need of today’s technology.
  • “One way ticket to the moon” problem must be solve by pull back the control key from providers and put them all work in a hard competition to fulfill client’s business value.
  • A people-centric IT solution need tobe provided in a protocol independent way that is a “hybrid of on-premises and public on-demand” and let client select on-premise or off-premise solution for specific service needs.
  • Finally, this inter-Cloud model shall support a seamless use of services or mix of services, reusable asset, and feature level services from various providers.

2Achieved Openness

The openness of distributed architecture divided in two parts: open implementation in data centers that includes the implementation of open and standardized packages, formats, artifacts and infrastructure, second is the intercloud protocols and standards. The formation of self-sustainable cloud required isolation and independence of logical management of intra-infrastructure resources from protocols to manage the interactions between providers. For example, shifting a service deployed on Amazon proprietary machine image format to GoGrid andportability on OpenStack ecosystem is only possible by isolating internal platform management and intercloud interfaces like OCCI[17].

2.1 Technological Interoperablity

Technology is very versatile, new technology will bring new emerging trends. If the technology that we use today did not have some level of interoperability designed into them then services we take such as electricity, communications and computers would not exist.

Figure 2. Distribution of users on adopted open technologies

However, interoperability solutions provided by multiple research groups for cloud are very dissimilar to each other. Some of the solutions based on some pre-defined standards like DMTF [11], some are providing static interfaces like EC2 [15] between partial heterogeneous clouds, some research groups dedicate additional network carrier cloud for inter-cloud operations like GICTF [19], whereas other research groups like IEEE [22] are building some internet analogous architecture for interoperability.

Above distribution of adoption of cloud model, presented in figure 2, gives rise to some critical questions: which one is the best solution? What will happen in future whenorganizations shifted to different interoperability providers? Is it needed to build an additional interoperability layer over existing interoperability layer?

Under this view, commercial strategies of dominant firms, e.g. Amazon in above distribution,are limitinginteroperability. Unfortunately, cloud technologies were not designed with interoperability in mind, contemporary open cloud is not going to design with client trust management in mind. Cloud openness requirements need to be driven from the user’s needs and expectations instead of the cloud provider’s business interest.

Providers normally look for user lock-in to protect their assets. For example, an on demand service provisioning requires an on demand interoperability. Cloud interoperation requires the automation of all the management tasks across cloud provider boundaries, yet even a single cloud provider is unable to achieve real automation [31].

2.2 Cloud Provider’s Dominancy over Openness

Companies are biased to provide a solution for interoperability and federations, some are now suggesting following dominant vendor rules. Following are some dominating cloud providers that are deriving cloud market for their monetary concerns:

1)70 percent usage of Amazon APIs for IaaS are making it de facto standard for the majority of the vendors seraching for compatiblity with AWS. However, EC2 and other cloud APIs having proprietary versions e.g. SQS, SNS, SES.Therefore, the applications developed by using these non open source APIs of Amazon are always under the risk of vendor lock in in future.

2)VMware [41] is also becoming a big player in cloud market. It has vast APIs and a designed community to exercise its packages. However, its all offerings are portable and interoperable only through its own ecosystem.

3)SalesForce is also having part in designing a community of providers. It is providing a hosting system system for customer’s applications and databases. However, the major service is storage.

4).NET and IIS server is providing a centeral server for Windows Azure. SQL Azure is also providing storage services. However, whole platform is proprietary and for monetary purposes.

The major problem is, the massive part of the open cloud research existing today has promising potential for cloud problems but cloud providers are not ready to put into practice it all. Their offerings are incorporated to limited set of inter-cloud operations, and their solutions are catalyst to create small communities that directly or indirectly fasten the client to their cloud. A cloud model is needed that force them to adopt a global and open cloud solution so that all the worldwide clients can be facilitated. An unbiased research is needed that force them to unlock customers and compete with each other to fulfill customer’s business value services.

2.3 Open Interfaces

Open interface allows the developers to language agnostically integrate different platforms into their solutions. As versatility of technology let it replaced by an innovative technology, functioning and adoption of inappropriate and pre-emptive interfaces for cloud services is always risky.By passing over the implementation details, let's see the degree to which they get succeeded in offering portable solutions:

5)jCloud [18]: Apache jClouds offers you portability in cloud services and abstractions. However, inter-cloud portability solution is not fully constructed.

6)LibCloud [18]: Apache Libcloud is really breaking the barriers of proprietary, is a standard Python base library that provide unified abstraction of cloud computing APIs.

7)Open Cloud Computing Interface (OCCI) [33]: An open specification and API for cloud interoperability, portability, and integration. Open in format, schema and dependencies provide a perfect open solution by integration with OpenStack [36].

8)The Apache Deltacloud is a RESTfull API [14], supporting different flavors on front end. To support DMTF open cloud solution it provide CIMI base front end and to support so called defacto standard from properietary cloud providers it provide a front end for EC2. Additionally, it has its own classic Deltacloud library. Deltacloud providing support to majority of cloud providers by unification of the these APIs into it and an IaaS platform at backend.

9)Standards like Open Virtualization Format (OVF) [13] are presented by DMTF. OVF is actually the abstraction of commonly agreed open formats that provide portable services to heterogeneous platforms. However,about 23 standard development organization are developing infrastructure, management and functional standards. Infrastructure standards get some maturity in particular contries e.g. US whereas functional and goverance standards are still under development.

10)Unified Cloud Interface (UCI) [5] is anonther attempt to abstract the commonalities and variabilities of various cloud APIs to create an open-standard cloud interface.The aim is to create an API of APIs that provide single point of contact for whole cloud centeric stack of technologies and diverse infrastructures.

11)Cloud Standardization: Organizations like Open Management Group (OMG), Distributed Management Task Force (DMTF), Open Grid Forum (OGF), Open Cloud Consortium (OCC), Cloud Security Alliance (CSA) and Storage Networking Industry Association (SNIA) are working together using a collaborative infrastructure to coordinate the standards about cloud computing, networking and storage technologies. Standardization areas includes intra and intercloud resource management protocols, data artifacts, packaging formats and security and authentication mechanisms. Table 1, presented below, summarizes the dominating APIs of cloud market along with their supported platforms and majorservices.

TABLE I. Dominated Inter-Cloud Open APIs

Approaches and Limitations / Popular
Supported Platforms / Services
Apache Libcloud
A project created by CloudClick and released under Apache 2.0 license. / Abstracts away the differences of more than 30 different provider’s APIs. / Amazon, Eucalyptus, IBM, Rackspace, OpenNebula, OpenStack and Enomoly / Cloud Server, Block and Object Storage.
CDN e.g. Rackspace CloudFiles
DNS and Load Balancing as a Service
DeltaCloud
incubated in Apache community / DeltaCloud API offers multiple wrappings to facilitate the translation of the service request to final service provider. / GoGrid, OpenNebula, Amazon, Rackspace, vCloud, Terramark, OpenStack, Microsoft Azure and Google Storage. / Allow auto-discovery and auto extension to new features.
Three different frontends: DMTF CIMI, DeltaCloud and Amazon EC2.
RHEM-V and vSphere installation as cloud.
JCloud
released under Apache 2.0 License / Proprietary breaking API gives support partial portability / Amazon, GoGrid, Eucalyptus, Azure, Ninefold, OpenStack, Rackspace, and vCloud / ComputeService provide abstraction to virtualization.
StoraeService deals with key-value storage services.
Offering REST/SOAP, Synchronous/asynchronous map base APIs.
RedHat Libvirt
Released under GNU lesser general public license / Common information model base allowing to access to virtualization resources in Linux environment. / IBM PowerVM, Microsoft Hyper-V, VMWare ESX, GSX hypervisors. / Management of hosts, domains, pools and other resources.
OCCI
Open cloud computing Interface by OGF / Set of protocols and API with RESTFul interafces that Vendor agnostically manages the cloud tasks. It offers Schema, format, dependencies free rich and flexible ways of interoperability and portability. / Rackspace
OpenNebula Oracle
OpenStack Platform Computing
CloudCentral GoGrid
CohesiveFT Cisco
RabbitMQ Flexiscale ElasticHosts / Interoperability
Portability
Integration
Management
Innovation

Thanks to the open cloud for attempting to make our life easier. However, a single open solution is not a complete solution; “portability is unstructured on jCloud”, “LibCloud/DeltaCloud is just integrating services from different cloud providers”, “OpenStack API is still not stable and fully documented”, “Open nebula solution for data center is limited in inter-cloud architecture”, “OCCI/OVF standards for the interfaces and images”. A prebuilt suit by integrating all these solutions, in a cloud provider, can maximize the potential of interoperability and portability. Unfortunately, in real world there is not a single example of such a cloud provider exist. Today’s cloud provider's emperors made some crucial pitfalls in current cloud model that may be impossible for them to fill.

2.4 Open Platforms and Communities

OpenStack[36] is giving the tough time to Amazon by building open and standardized alternates of proprietary technologies. Their vision is to answer the long lasting questions that Amazon, Microsoft and VMWare is unable to answer. They are designing an ecosystem of open cloud providers that committed to open sourceand can innovate to power the future of technology. OpenStack focus on semantic abstraction and developing drivers to plug in different implementations. To facilitate distribution it has implemented industry standard message passing architecture. Openstack have CDMI or OCCI base portability and interoperability implementation for data center [14].

OpenNebula [31] is really going one step forward than OpenStack by attempting to manage heterogeneous data centers. OpenNebula is working in multi-tier systems and the basic services it is providing includes virtualization, storage, network and security services [25]. The aim of OpenNebula is to independent the service automation layer from orchestration layer in cloud ecosystem to enrich their build solution with extensibility, flexibility and openness. OpenNebula is the best known infrastructure that support burst computing by managing heterogeneous cloud environment by mixing private, public, community and hybrid service delivery cloud models.