Cloud Federation

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Cloud Computing Federation Annotated Bibliography
Kurze, T. (2013). Cloud Computing and Load balancing. SDN Basics for service providers, 1 (2), 2-3
This journal explains the meaning of cloud federation as a practice of bringing together two or more service providers with an aim of load balancing hike in demand and traffic. Cloud federation ensures providers rent out or wholesale resources to other willing cloud providers. Depending on the federation agreement between providers a resource can become permanent or temporary concerning cloud computing environment. Kurze highlights how cloud federation offers benefits to cloud providers by allowing them earn revenue from resources they provide which would have been underutilized or rendered idle. Providers also get freedom from the cloud federation to expand their geographic business space and satisfy new demands without creating new points of presence (POPs).
The idea behind this article is that every service provider has to follow cloud federation aspect of transparency to customers when providing services like billing support system and cloud provisioning. The author breaks different mandates of every cloud provider in knowing the extension of service-level agreements with their customers and how or when to provide information to data provider centers.
Bernstein, D.& Demchenko, Y. (2013). “The IEEE Intercloud Testbed — Creating the Global of Clouds”, Cloud Computing Technology and Science (CloudCom), 2013 IEEE 5th International Conference on, 2(5) 47-53
In any organization or company, there exist managers who ensure the goals of the organization or company are achieved within a stipulated time frame.

In order to achieve their goals the federation like any other company or organization has its own model of governance that guides them towards achieving their mission. In this journal the authors articulate for a well-defined model of governance for all federations. The model comprises of cloud exchange managers who implement every function within the registry by storing information; Cloud coordinator who manages different clouds and is a bridge to external clouds, and finally the cloud broker who represent the federation to the user by finding the best cloud providers from the federation.
The authors tend to explain how cloud federations are managed using different models of governance. The authors also outline different problems that are solved using different governance approaches, with an aim of providing adequate information for any reader to understand.
Yisheng, W. & Haopeng C. (2013). “Dynamic Resource Arrangement in Cloud Federation”,  Services Computing Conference (APSCC), 2013 IEEE Asia-Pacific, 48-60
Cloud federation is mandated to provide various services in order to achieve their goals. Page 50 of this journal discusses the critical goal of cloud computing that is to provide quality resources on demand and accurate data information when required by cloud federation service. It is also the mandate of the provider as required by the cloud federation to show or charge/bill information to the consumer depending on many reasons.
This article answers several questions like; who is required to bill information to the consumer? What are the cloud federation goals? When, how and what information to provide to the federation by providers?
Mashayekhy, L., Nejad, M.M. & Grosu, D. (2015). “Cloud Federations in the Sky: Formation Game and Mechanism”, Cloud Computing, IEEE Transactions on, 3 (1) 14-27
In this journal the authors tend to elaborate on the meaning of cloud federation and how it works in providing services or resources to user and providers. This journal explains how cloud federation can be termed as a new paradigm that gives freedom to provider’s to sell their resources and also reject new customers when they find that they don’t have enough resources to satisfy every customer demands. Providers are also allowed to outsource their idle resources in relation to demand variations hence making profit in the process. Providers are also allowed by the cloud federation to shutdown idle resources if possible to save power and reduce expenses.
Information provided by this article helps in understanding if providers are allowed to outsource their resources to other providers and how cloud federation supervises and facilitates the outsourcing of resources.
Schmidt, R. & Mohring, M. (2013). “Two-Phase Composition of Complex Business Services in Cloud-Environments”, Enterprise Distributed Object Computing Conference Workshops (EDOCW), 2013 17th IEEE International, 1(1) 12-19
What is cloud computing? How does cloud federation operate in providing cloud resources to providers? What are the technological development and changes? What are the privileges of cloud computing to users? In this journal the authors provides a thorough examination and explanation of cloud computing.
The article examines the new technological development and how cloud computing supports utilization of Information Technology infrastructure, applications, and services to institutions and people. Cloud computing is based on service delivery platform whereby users don’t own applications and infrastructure but use them any time they need on pay-per-use approach. It’s, therefore, the responsibility of service providers who own this IT infrastructure to provide and make them accessible, and also maintain them to ensure they are accessed through the internet.
Schmidt and Mohring discuss more on fundamental approaches of distributed and parallel computing giving explanations on conceptual framework and models that help in creating cloud computing applications and system. According to the author, there are two fundamental models of computing; parallel and sequential. Page thirteen of the journal discusses computing elements developed in modern era under sequential and parallel platforms; applications, compliers, problem solving-settings and architectures.
Information given by the article clearly explains cloud federation services to providers and users at the same time. The article goes further to explain different platforms offered by cloud federation.
Shixing Yan, Chunqing Chen, Guopeng Zhao & Bu Sung Lee. (2013). “Cloud service andselection for enterprises”, Network and service management (CNSM), 2012 8th conference and 2013 workshop on systems virtualization management (SVM), 26 (22)430-434
This journal outlines services offered by cloud federation to cloud providers and users; solutions when providers run out of resources that can constantly satisfy users’ demands. The author gives an example using data center, whereby resources are over-utilized during the day and under-utilized during the night. Therefore irrespective of data centers being under-utilized during the night, providers cannot switch off and are allowed to take advantage of this situation to earn more. Cloud federation allows users to transform a simple and physical data center to a cloud virtualization infrastructure. Small and medium providers can rent their resources that are mostly idle to other providers who have many users and can also scale up and down when they have many users by borrowing from other providers. This is encouraged by the fact that clouds do not have infinite resources thus renting and selling is allowed. The authors also explain situations that can happen when a cloud temporarily shuts down or has problems with computing and storage capabilities: the cloud will not be able to offer Service Level Agreement (SLA) according to customer demands, instantiation requests by users will not be going through, and any modification requests sent by users will not be met accordingly.
Cloud federation service uses virtual infrastructure to distinguish between small, medium and large cloud providers and provides this information to the user who want to access it anytime. Large clouds are known to be owned by large companies like Amazon while small and medium clouds are used by small and medium companies respectively.
Cloud federation service allows cloud providers also to migrate their services when they wish to. Migration of VMs from one cloud to another can increase benefits compared to independent clouds. However, trust is utmost needed between partners willing to migrate their clouds. This can save power by reducing the energy consumption of data centers and create buck up and security.
This article is useful in understanding when cloud providers should provide resources to users, how to provide their resources, how to share their resources between each other, companies that own large clouds or resources, service level agreement between provider and user, benefits of independent clouds and how trust can boost cloud business.
Simmons, B., Ghanbari, H., Litoiu, M.& Iszlai, G. (2013). “Managing a SaaS application in theusing PaaS policy sets and a strategy-tree”, Network and Service Management (CNSM), 2013 7th International Conference on, 28 (24) 21-32
There are various benefits associated with cloud computing in a federation. The world is turning into a global village with every household able to access the internet, a computer or run business online. However, there also disadvantages of adopting cloud computing.
Simmons, Ghanbari, Litoiu and Iszlai stress that cloud computing is significantly defining and addressing modern networked era of computing paradigm. Users are able to use and run their computations irrespective of size, using cloud services at a subsidized and favorable cost as compared to setting up personal data centers. Cloud computing offers many advantages to any user in the modern age. However, some organizations, health departments, financial sectors and governments are reluctant to adopt it. In this article, the authors stipulate clearly major reasons behind their reluctance: Quality of data Protection in the cloud (QoP), mistrust in cloud services and Lack of Service Level Agreement (SLAs). Part of the cloud federation services is to bring both private and public providers together to ensure cloud bursting and multi-tenancy services reach the end user while supporting Quality of Protection of data (QoP) and Lack of Service Level Agreement (SLAs) which are wanted by banks, governments, health care sector, financial departments and others. Chapter four of this book explains vividly how cloud federation services have drafted an architecture of contrail structure of Virtual Execution Platform (VEP) to be incorporated with IaaS stages of cloud providers in the world. Virtual Execution Platform (VEP) improves quality services provided by cloud providers and brings in trust to cloud computing by incorporating QoP and SLAs that used to be missing. Typically the work of federation to users is to improve the quality of service and transparency.
This article outlines different approaches and platforms that can be used to maximize use of cloud resources by both users and providers. Different approaches and platforms have been elaborated clearly and how to use them in curbing user reluctance in adopting cloud computing.
Baranwal, G.& Vidyarthi, D.P. (2014). “An econometric based model for resource scarcity problem in Cloud computing”, Electronics, Computing and Communication Technologies (IEEE CONECCT), IEEE International Conference on, 1(1) 1 – 6
There are new providers who wish to enter into a federation but don’t know how to operate in a federation or even provide quality resources to their users. Cloud federations have different standards or rules that are to be used by their providers and users. This article explains the responsibilities and advantages of being a provider and the rights of the user and provider.
Users have all the right to choose which provider they want to subscribe to and if they find a suitable provider when running their applications they are free to exploit the chance by switching. Resources offered by providers vary with respect to levels of abstraction. Cloud federal service cannot standardize all cloud providers due to varying levels of obstruction, whereby some providers interchange services at a low level of obstruction while others in the upper-level offer at a low or nothing. Having the freedom to switch to any cloud provider has its own challenges too to users whereby they need to adapt to new applications provided by new providers. In order to ease the burden of switching, cloud federation service came up with Open Virtualization Format and Open Cloud Computing Interface to give solutions. However, some of these approaches are yet to be accepted and adopted by cloud providers.
Anyone intending to join a cloud federation will find enough information from this journal on how to operate in a cloud federation by using different approaches in providing resources. Providers in the market are also informed on how the federation helps in switching resources to satisfy users.
Sotomayor, B., Montero, R.S., Martín Llorente, I., & Foster, I. (2013).”Resource Leasing and the Art of Suspending Virtual Machines”, High-Performance Computing and Communications, 2013. HPCC ’13. 11th IEEE International Conference, 1(1) 49-61
This modern era has seen many companies and organization embracing cloud computing in producing their services or products to consumers. Every organization or company has its own goals to achieve in an environment that is competitive; this article helps in identifying advantages of adopting cloud computing in rendering services or producing products that are competitive in the market.
Authors of this journal use their knowledge to encourage and give advantages of cloud computing. They explain how strategy focused companies and businesses identify advantages and importance of cloud computing and how its innovative features meet their daily internal needs. The article stresses the need for organizations to embrace the three metric suites that include: perceived competitive advantage, innovation inclination, and executive support. Innovation inclination affects the urge to adopt new IT in an organization, executive support provides a positive environment with opportunities and enough resources for cloud adoption, and business value perception of competitive advantage influences how and a business adopts cloud computing.
In page fifty-three of the journal, the authors’ highlights factors that influence suitability of adopting cloud computing. These include economic valuation; vendor, market and service reputation influence decision making on whether to migrate to cloud computing. Managers in any business need to evaluate availability, suitability of cloud computing and if their economic position supports adoption of cloud computing. Regulation and environment; every business faces regulation from authorities and challenges both form internal and external environment. Any business will always face challenges externally creating obstacles and pressure for adopting cloud computing. According to the authors, business environment can be divided into segments: industry concentration; includes structure, maturity and technological composition of the business. Product life cycle; reflected by competition and market segmentation.
The journal tends to appeal to all organization, companies, and non-profit institutions the need of adopting cloud computation provided by any cloud federation.
Aditya, D., David, V., Ivan, R., Javier, D., & Manish,P. (2013). Cloud Federation is Layered service model. Journal of Computer and System Sciences, 78 (5) 1330-1335
Cloud federations are made up by multiple providers; some are doing well in providing resources to users while others aren’t. To harmonize both cases cloud federation has to find an infrastructure that will enable all of their providers to earn from resource provision. This journal identifies different software, infrastructure, and platforms that bring together all providers.
The authors of this journal highlight how cloud service infrastructure (laaS), platform (PaaS) and software (SaaS) can influence multiple independent cloud providers by creating a federation among all providers. This layered design leads to a platform and sequence on how cloud federations supervise providers in every service layer. Federations increase consumer value by ensuring the business model for providing cloud is consistent and are of quality, cloud federation achieves this result by testing the performance of software in calculating Weather Research and Forecasting service (WRF).
Yao, Q. (2013). Digital Library Construction Strategy of the Literature Sharing as the Core:Discussion of the “EduChina” of Chinese Education Digital Library[J];Journal of Academic Libraries, 26 (5) 12-31
There are several highlighted importance of cloud computing especially to public institutions and sector today. This journal analyzes the importance of cloud computing to public institutions and organizations like universities and schools.
In the 21st century, about all universities are shifting to e-learning or rather distance learning program, according to the author, cloud computing helps in easing financial burden in universities providing e-learning. Cloud computing also helps in marinating school IT infrastructure in real-time keep truck to any suspicious vulnerability. Institutions offering e-learning are therefore encouraged to embrace cloud computing when developing portals for e-learning using a set of metrics. According to Yao, cloud computing is a newly developed technology urging schools to pay close attention to matters concerning data probability, cross-border transfer of vital information, data availability, liabilities, content copyright, troubleshooting, export restrictions and security of their systems. Institutions should also select cloud that supports their required features especially in education institutions since some don’t provide enough safety measures.
Sotomayor, B., Montero, R.S., Martín Llorente, I. & Foster, I. (2015). Wireless and ubiquitous connectivity: IEEE 4th International Conference on Mobile Services. ICMS journals, 2 (3) 1
There are many ways in which support teams and IT operations benefit more from new cloud models. Systems that still create and provide traditional IT infrastructure are finding it hard to meet their goals and demands of every client. Traditional IT is inefficient and expensive to develop and in many cases it is overshadowed by cloud computing. Large and small scale clouds need automation to be time and cost effective.
Aditya, D., David, V., Ivan, R., Javier, D., Norman, B. & Yanbin L. (2013). Cloud federation in a layered service model. Journal of Computer and System Sciences, 78 (5) 1300-1352
Cloud federation guarantees security when monitoring file integrity and logging on under SIEM by ensuring all cloud providers prevent data leakage, content filtering, firewall audits, intrusion detection, and web layer firewalling.
Authors in this journal emphasize on how patch and vulnerability can be managed by cloud operation infrastructure. Users will only buy resources that are compliant, trusted and secure; to achieve this every cloud provider must use automated method in handling patch and cloud vulnerability. Cloud federation management has security policies that should be complied with before executing any machine provisioning. Some of these policies include geo-fencing policies that determine where associated data and virtual machines are allowed to access and function. Geo-fencing can also be described as geographical location whereby a virtual machine can only work or run under a geographical data center in a physical location. For example, a virtual machine can only run in a data center in London and Southampton.
Technology-enforced and trusted execution policies: for any virtual machine to operate it needs attestation and TXT boot integrity, and by no means will be authorized to access non-tested or unverified platforms and hypervisors.
Compliance reporting: every security transmitted data and audit logs from exposed scans are directly linked to security controls framework and maintained continuously by monitoring its GRC data systems. Continuous evaluation ensures data location and workloads comply with security and trust policies.
Policy on data security: cloud federation services stipulate clearly that and confidential, private and sensitive data not limited to PII system, should be safeguarded with encryptions or tokenization technology that must be in line with FIPS 140-20 level. The whole encryption process to provision a virtual machine can be accessed from cloud administrator.
24/7 security observation policy: according to the authors, continuous scrutiny of real-time security, event administration, and cloud environment using Xstream Siem (xSIEM). (SIEM) tools ensure every event is collated in the cloud system. It’s, therefore, necessary for all providers to continuously monitor and verify their profiles from possible threats in the environment and provide real-time information to their users and cloud federation security operations department. Providers are allowed to monitor their profiles and cloud infrastructure using SIEM, which react to any suspicious activity or information that seeks to compromise with workload or cloud infrastructure. Providers can also use xSIEM tool to get information in real time on trust policies that could have been performed by cloud management software concerning workload migration inside or outside the data provider center.
Portal orchestration and cloud management policy: for any business to take place between providers and users portal orchestration and cloud management policy should be adhered to; this policy enables the provider and the tenant to work harmoniously without nay suspicion. The tenant or user is free to store and compute while the provider provides and manages resources in a reliable and secure manner without any friction.
Hao Z., Rahman, R. & Aberer, K. (2014). “Decentralizing the cloud: How can small data centers cooperate?”, Peer-to-Peer Computing (P2P), 14-th IEEE International Conference on, 1 (1) 2-9
This journal analyzes steps that can be followed when developing e-business. Cloud computing business is on the rise, but only a few know how to come up with suitable and flexible resources as per the demand in the market. Providers need to choose the best resources in order to make the profit and satisfy users; it is, therefore, the responsibility of cloud federation to potential advice providers on the best resources to develop.
Clegg, R.G., Clayman, S., Pavlou, G., Mamatas, L. & Galis, A. (2013). “On the Selection of Management/Monitoring Nodes in Highly Dynamic Networks”, Computers, IEEE Transactions on, 62 (6) 1200-2000
Clegg, Clayman, Pavlou, Mamatas and Galis explain goals of access management in cloud computing by cloud federation service management. The author outlines and explains security services that can be incorporated in an institution or organization Information Technology infrastructure. These components include:
Authorization access service: according to the book, in order to come up with a centralized management in emerging infrastructure, there is need to integrate access management systems. Supported integration points and authorization frame work are part of access management system that need to discovered and integrated.
Authentication access service: authentication schemes depend on business, organization and technological reasons. Access management by cloud federation offers a range authentication access to support every user needs. Once an identity has been authenticated, authentication points should be transmitted to IT systems within the institution or organization to prevent the cost of implementing future authentication.
Audit services: it is the work of managers in cloud federation management to audit capabilities of providers to identify loop holes in their management. The audit is critical in generating trust from users hence need for critical and accurate information from providers to cloud federation mangers and users.
Federated identity access service: due to advanced strategic relationships between customers and partners in an organization, urge for IT system to interface with the organization requirement that include agreement and contracts are needed. Federated services should also enhance trust allowing transfer of security points into consumable tokens.
Mian, R., Elgazzar, K., Khalifa, S., Martin, P., Silberman, G. & Goldschmidt, D.(2014). “Near- clouds: Bringing public clouds to users’ doorsteps,” Computers and Communication (ISCC), 2014 IEEE Symposium on, 5(26) 11-52
Cloud federations are created between parties in the same or static environment who collaborate to provide cloud services to gain economies of scale and expand their capabilities to satisfy different users and requirements.
In this article Mian, Elgazzar, Khalifa, Martin, Silberman and Goldschmidt advocate for cross-cloud system management from cloud federation service managers in order to create a homogenous working condition. The primary need for Cross-cloud system management is to ensure new federations created by small, medium or large providers are protected. It provides adaptability and flexibility as per the cloud computing paradigm, enabling providers to benefit from cross-cloud migration and collaboration.
Kirkham, T., Matthews, B., Jeffery, K., Djemame, K. & Armstrong, D. (2013). “Richer Requirements for Better Clouds”, Cloud Computing Technology and Science (CloudCom), 2013 IEEE 5th International Conference on, 2 (4) 5-15
Due to security challenges that affect both providers and users, cloud federation management is obligated to provide security services to their clients. A cloud federation can adopt a project that safeguards the security of all associated members.
Cloud federation in Europe has come up with Contrail project that handles performance, security and interoperability problems. This allows the federation of same clouds to distribute their resources and applications QoP and QoS constraints. As an integrated service Contrail is also open to virtualization that deals with infrastructure service (IaaS) and a platform (PaaS).
This article used Europe Contrail project as an example to explain how security can be enhanced by adopting QoP, QoS, IaaS and PaaS in safeguarding their associates.
Wubin, Li., Svard, P., Tordsson, J.& Elmroth, E. (2013). “A General Approach to Service Deployment in Cloud Environments”, Cloud and Green Computing (CGC), 2013 Second International Conference on, 89-115.
To promote any economic gain, cloud federation management must find a suitable support system that sustains mobility.
According to Wubin, Svard, Tordosson and Elmroth, mobility is significant in changing and refurbishing cloud applications in terms of service provided, time, terminal capacity, privacy, security, location and resources available. However, there are different approaches employed by the cloud federation management in resolving challenges, such approaches include creating awareness context (QoE) in the cloud application and using the awareness to come up with enhanced mobile subscribers.
It is the responsibility of cloud federation service managers to ensure security is enhanced in mobile clouding by adopting privacy, data protection, authentication, identity trust and accounting in clouds. The author explains how mobile clouds share the same public platform hence need for cloud management by ensuring confidentiality and data protection is paramount.
Schmidt, R. & Mohring, M. (2013). “Two-Phase Composition of Complex Business Services in Cloud-Environments”, Enterprise Distributed Object Computing Conference Workshops (EDOCW), 2013 17th IEEE International, 1(1) 12-19
Managing cloud federation services is vital in terms of integrating information and translating federated information to various domains clouds. Cloud federations are flooded with both private and public cloud providers who need the same services from the federation.
This journal elaborates challenges faced by virtual private cloud providers when providing resources to tenets. Many virtual private cloud providers face satisfaction based challenges from tenants and cloud federation; they find it hard to bring together resources, policy management components, and services when trying to cross their data centers to different geographic locations and across cloud federal service providers. Managers managing cloud federation chip in to help connect the two bridges designed differently and for different purpose together by employing compatible authentication, same access control, and function.
Virtual private clouds are more concerned by information about their resources given to users by cloud federation management, identities networking with resources in the cloud and infrastructure in any VPCs cloud.
Tram, T., & Chen-Khong T. (2014). “A Novel Model for Competition and Cooperation among Cloud Providers”, Cloud Computing, IEEE Transactions on, 2 (3) 245-161
What is ROI? What are the factors that influence increase and decrease of Return On Investment? How are providers supposed to do to increase their ROI? How do they solve different challenges in order to achieve ROI?
Tram and Chen-Khong try to explain the meaning of return on investment in consideration to various factors. In page two forty-seven, authors describe elements that face any market decision in cloud computing that includes: returns, hurdle rates, investment or expenditure, and risks. The success of any business is reflected by projected which should be more than hurdle rate after subtracting cost and considering risks. Cloud federation on return of investment ensures providers are familiar with how to make more profit with higher revenue than making profit with constant revenues.
Understanding every detail from this journal helps in identifying approaches used by providers as advised by cloud federations in achieving ROI. Readers are also able to understand how providers make profit in the market and what advises does the federation give to providers to maximize their ROI.
Jianfeng, Z., Lei, W., Weisong, S. and Yi L. (2014). “In Cloud, Can Scientific Communities Benefit from the Economies of Scale?” Parallel and Distributed Systems, IEEE Transactions on, 23 (5) 264-300
In order to understand how cloud federation management helps providers in increasing their Return On Investment, the authors used Europe as a market that harbor a good number of providers who are making benefits from providing resources to users.
The authors of this journal have used European IT infrastructure management service to explain how cloud federation should work to maximize Return On Investment. According to the authors, in 2006, cloud market share in Europe was worth 51 billion Euros; in 2012 market share increased by 12%. They made an approximation of 21% is expected to be spent on enterprise application and 9% on custom software. Cloud computing market is expected to be $96 by 2014 which represents 13% of the software market in the world. Cloud federation should encourage upcoming providers to team up and provide resources that will capture the market by satisfying every consumer demand.
The vivid analysis of European market shows that the author intends to encourage providers to emulate Europe as an example to expand their market and increase their Return On Investment.
Sinderen, M. (2012). Enterprise interoperability 4th International IFIP Working Conference, IWEI 2012, Harbin, China, September 6-7, 2012. Proceedings, 19 (8) 5-7
Cloud computing services rendered to providers who in turn sell it to users from cloud federations are meant to bring in profits. This is a business like any other which needs appropriate management and goals to be achieved. This journal outlines different measures or steps undertaken in ensuring providers increase their Return On Investment.
Sinderen highlights how cloud federation can help manufactures in coming up with virtualization prerequisite that will enable them to manufacture robust cloud platforms while sharing resources and capabilities hence reducing inventory holding cost, and increasing the Return on Investment (ROI) during manufacturing. Cloud manufacturing virtualization is expensive considering resources needed like human labor and skill, materials and equipment. Manufactures are then advised to choose the best and favorable resources which are flexible to any mapping strategy to reduce failure caused by unprecedented dynamics. Manufactures should also come up with resources that meet users’ demands; this can be achieved by pooling together their efforts in capacity building, warehousing, transport, and granularity.
XU Jian et al. (2013). Research, Development, Innovation Performance of Virtualization Research and Development Teams[J]; Journal of Anhui Agricultural Sciences, 33
According to the authors, cloud federation can achieve increase in Return On Investment by handling the following challenges: how to evaluate and monitor quality of service offered to users which is against SLA, how to measure and increase use of resources by users, how to manage and supervise configurations over hosting platforms and how to define and implement security polices within the federation.
This is one of the approaches elaborated by XU and others to readers and cloud providers on how to maximize Return On Investment in cloud computing business. These approaches are laid down by the cloud federation management who advise their providers to adopt them.
Jianfeng Z., Lei W., Xiaona L., Weisong S., Chuliang W., Wenyao Z. & Xiutao Z. (2013). “Cost-Aware Cooperative Resource Provisioning for Heterogeneous Workloads in Data Centers”, Computers, IEEE Transactions on, 62(11) 2160 – 2170
According to authors of this journal, there is the need to assess the business value and economic suitability of cloud computing by cloud federation service management. They should be able to know estimated cost reduction, contract flexibility and suitability, and pricing system to increase Return On Investments. The cost of calculating cloud services either hidden or operation should be considered before starting resource business. Maturity in the cloud market, with favorable market demand and supply, increases the rate of Return On Investment.
This means providers need to know how to calculate Return On Investment concerning cost and profits made. Some providers may think they are making enough profits within a short period but at long run they run into losses due to various challenges in the market.
Abdo, J. (2014). e-Technologies and Networks for Development (ICeND), 2014 Third International Conference on date April 29 2014-May 1 2014. IEEE journal, 15 (7) 3-9
There are various price models employed by cloud federation management in ensuring all their providers get profit while providing resources at a lower cost. Information derived from this article is a comprehensive research done by the author in identifying features and models embraced by cloud federation services in maximizing their profits.
Resource Provisioning SLA features and pricing models are used to optimize profit and investment in cloud networks. According to Abdo, federated cloud network is mathematically proven to increase Return On Investment compared to standalone cloud networks.
Bassem, N., Mike, S., Stuart M. & Xiaoyu Y. (2013). A business-oriented Cloud federation model for real-time applications. Future Generation Computer Systems. ScienceDirect Journal, 1(1) 1-3
How does the cloud federation service help in ensuring there is a constant availability of resources to consumers? The federation adopts different cloud projects like VISION.
VISION Cloud project is used by the federation to define four different domains in the market that includes: telecommunication, enterprise, media and health care. Kyriazis stipulates that VISION project helps the federation in: creating higher and continuous availability, supporting data backup from different providers, changing providers any time when the demand arises to avoid vendor lock, creating an interface in storage systems and supporting brokerage on public markets.
De Rose, L., Rajiv, B., Rajkumar, B., & Rodrigo, N. (2013). CloudSim: a toolkit for modelingand simulation of cloud computing environments and evaluation of resource provisioning algorithms. Wiley journals, 41(1) 23-55
There are several ways used by the cloud federation management in acquiring accurate information from different providers on the resource performance.
De Rose and other authors describe OPTIMIS as a project used by the federation to deploy their approach. Infrastructure owned by the federation is able to use OPTIMIS to access and acquire resources from different cloud service providers automatically. This project is also used by the federation to manage autonomic features in their infrastructure.
This information is critical in understanding how cloud federations acquire real-time information from providers and how they monitor every provider and user.
Boob, S., Gonzalez-Velez, H. & Popescu, A.M. (2014). “Automated Instantiation of Heterogeneous Fast Flow CPU/GPU Parallel Pattern Applications in Clouds”,  Parallel, Distributed and Network-Based Processing (PDP), 2014 22nd Euromicro International Conference on, 1 (1) 120-132
What are the challenges involved in operating from a different country? How are these challenges solved through cloud federations? What are the services offered by the cloud federation in curbing different challenges brought forward by their providers? This journal provides all information needed by providers when faced by different challenges.
The authors bring out the fact that every nation has its own different rules and regulations regarding data governance, data sovereignty, and data privacy. Many countries and states prefer copyrighted and customer data kept within their boundaries by cloud providers. This is a concern and a challenge for multinational businesses or business willing to expand abroad, it’s, therefore, necessary for any business to consider such challenges before they expand beyond their boundaries.
This journal proves that federations are there to provide solutions when providers and users face challenges. It explains further how these challenges are solved using different approaches in order to ensure their providers and users link efficiently despite geographical locations.
Bassem, N., Mike, S., Stuart M. & Xiaoyu Y. (2013). Special sections SS: Trusting Software and SS: Economics of Computing Services. Future Generation Computer Systems. ScienceDirect Journal, 29(1) 1150-1170
Bassem, Mike, Stuart and Xiaoyu highlight advantages of securing and integrating resources to enjoy the economies of scale. This has been discussed by other authors in this paper but what captures more about this information is the general observation from the authors on matters that outweigh current short comings experienced by providers and manufactures. The decrease in migration and increase in the scale of cloud computing will increase the Rate of Return and vice versa.
Bassem, N., Mike, S., Stuart M. & Xiaoyu Y. (2013). A business-oriented Cloud federation model for real-time applications. Future Generation Computer Systems. ScienceDirect Journal, 1(1) 1-3
Although cloud federation offers management and services to providers and users using different approaches, platforms and governing models, there are shortcomings associated with the architectural framework that enhances efficient resource provision to users and cloud hosting to providers.
Authors of this article are concerned about Cloud orientation software that is developing well in the market, but there are still requirements to be met for it to fit in any vibrant environment. Enterprises and academies are studying and have proposed for a new or advanced architectural framework to bring out cloud computing that is service oriented. Currently, the agenda of cloud computing is to come with an infrastructure that supports resource sharing which means there is the need to evolve and incorporate the legacy system into cloud platforms.
In conclusion, cloud federations are the modern platforms used by providers to rent and sell their resources to other providers and users respectively considering quality, trust, and agreement between the two. Although there are shortcomings, cloud federations are making broader steps in ensuring cloud provision is run effectively by developing new strategies, approaches and frameworks, and maintaining existing frameworks.